Category: Careers

Job profiles of an electronic engineer

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  1. Design Engineer: Takes specifications, defines architecture, does circuit design, runs simulations, supervises layout, tapes out the chip to the foundry, evaluates the prototype once the chip comes back from the fab.
  2. Product Engineer: Gets involved in the project during the design phase, ensures manufacturability, develops characterization plan, assembly guidelines, develops quality and reliability plan, evaluates the chip with the design engineer, and evaluates the chip through characterization, reliability qualification and manufacturing yield point of view (statistical data analysis). He is responsible for production release and is therefore regarded as a team leader on the project. Post production, he is responsible for customer returns, failure analysis, and corrective actions including design changes.
  3. Test Engineer: Develops test plan for the chip based on specifications and data sheet, creates characterization and production program for the bench test or the ATE (Automatic Test Equipment), designs test board hardware, correlates ATE results with the bench results to validate silicon to compare with simulation results. He works closely with the product engineer to ensure smooth release to production and post release support.
  4. Applications Engineer: Defines new products from system point of view at the customer’s end, based on marketing input. His mission is to ensure the chip works in the system designed or used by the customers, and complies with appropriate standards (such as Ethernet, SONET, WiFi etc.). He is responsible for all customer technical support, firmware development, evaluation boards, data sheets and all product documentation such as application notes, trade shows, magazine articles, evaluation reports, software drives and so on.
  5. Process Engineer: This is a highly specialized function which involves new wafer process development, device modeling, and lots of research and development projects. There are no quick rewards on this job! If you are R&D oriented, highly trained in semiconductor device physics area, do not mind wearing bunny suits (the clean room uniforms used in all fabs), willing to experiment, this job is for you.
  6. Packaging Engineer: This is another highly specialized job function. He develops precision packaging technology; new package designs for the chips, does the characterization of new packages, and does electrical modeling of the new designs.
  7. CAD Engineer: This is an engineering function that supports the design engineering function. He is responsible for acquiring, maintaining or developing all CAD tools used by a design engineer. Most companies buy commercially available CAD tools for schematic capture, simulation, synthesis, test vector generation, layout, parametric extraction, power estimation, and timing closure; but in several cases, these tools need some type of customization. A CAD engineer needs to be highly skilled in the use of these tools is able to write software routines to automate as many functions as possible and have a clear understanding of the entire design flow.

 

Be the Engineer of your Career

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Dream a unique engineering dream!

Engineering remains a profession many aspire to. It is truly a professional’s profession, but even this noble profession has recently lost its luster. This is mainly because students are not staying true to their passions but following the crowd in pursuing careers in fields distant from their passions.

To use an illustration, Jethro Tull –studied to be a lawyer but he ended up inventing the seed drill, a mechanical instrument that revolutionized agriculture. The trend today seems to be the opposite. We follow our passions into college – take up specialized courses but when it comes to choosing our careers, we bury our passions and follow the crowd.

CADDZOOM is carrying a series that takes a more in-depth look into the various engineering streams. We kick start this series with Mechanical Engineering.

Mechanical Engineering: inventing leverage!

Mechanical engineering, using principles of heat and mechanical power, designs, produces, and maintains mechanical systems. Mechanical engineers design and manufacture everything from small individual parts and devices (e.g., microscale sensors and inkjet printer nozzles) to large systems (e.g., spacecraft and machine tools). The sub disciplines of mechanical engineering include structural analysis, mechatronics and robotics, design and drafting, etc. Mechanical engineering emerged as a full-fledged stream during the industrial revolution.

However the mechanical engineering legacy starts with the simple machines. The six simple machines are: Lever, Wheel and Axel, Pulley, Inclined Plane, Wedge, Screw. A simple machine is an elementary device that has a specific movement (mechanism) providing a mechanical advantage. The invention of the wheel has been attributed as the invention, that changed the face of technology – its inventor can be regarded as the first mechanical engineer. Can you imagine what would have happened if he too had just gone with the flow? If farming was the trend then, the inventor of the wheel would have just gone on pulling the plough himself. The wheel wouldn’t have been invented!

Ferris wheel!

The Ferris wheel has brought joy to numerous fans since day one. The abandonment and freedom that a Ferris wheel provides, was possible only because George Ferris remained true to his design and passions. In response to a challenge to create a monument to outdo The Eiffel tower, at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Ferris responded with a proposed wheel from which visitors would be able to view the entire exhibition. The planners feared his design for a rotating wheel towering over the grounds could not possibly be safe. Ferris persisted. He returned in a few weeks with several respectable endorsements from established engineers, and the committee agreed to allow construction to begin, also recruited several local investors to cover the $400,000 cost of construction. The Ferris wheel thus stands as a testament to a mechanical engineer’s passions.