That Light at the End of the Jobs Tunnel

Recently I posted some hopeful anecdotes about the job market for semiconductor design engineers.

Now I read Tech layoffs continue, despite signs of economic improvement and it makes me feel my prior observations are the exceptions to the rule. What's your sense of the current job market? I'm hoping that my new found pessimism represents "capitulation", that point when hope is lost, and marks the nadir of a market or trend.

Engineering Halloween

He only pokes fun at Marketing a little bit this time.

I must confess, I once dressed as an integrated circuit for Halloween. It was in college and I was a DIP. Maybe that's why it didn't impress the girls? Have a great weekend.

Are You Listening?

When I'm out and about doing chores or exercising, chances are I'll be listening to my iPod. But more often than not, I'm listening to podcasts rather than music. Listening to podcasts is an efficient way of "reading on the go". You can catch up on the latest news stories, political opinions, or investment ideas. Those are my interests; you can find a podcast on practically any topic.

Have you listened to podcasts? Which are your favorites? In our field of semiconductor engineering, there's not a wealth of content. But here are some of my favorite engineering/technology podcasts to get you started.

1. IEEE Spectrum Podcast, which is described at Podcast Picks.
2. Science Friday by Ira Flatow. A classic high-quality program from NPR.
3. Security Now by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. It's mainly about computer security, but you can also learn the latest on PC software and networking by listening.

It's easiest to subscribe through iTunes, but there are other ways using the RSS feed and a "podcast catcher" program. Happy listening!

Synopsys Users' Group CFP

As you may have heard me say (write) before, the Synopsys Users' Group (SNUG) conference is the most useful conference I attend each year. If you're involved in chip design and haven't attended, you really need to check it out. There are conferences around the world, but the biggest one is in Silicon Valley every March.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because the Synopsys Users Group - San Jose Call for Papers is open! Here's a chance to show your chops and burnish your resume by demonstrating the cool stuff you're doing with Synopsys tools. The authors get a lot of support from the experience Technical Committee [full disclosure: I'm a member] to help develop their presentations and papers. Think about it, and I'll see you at SNUG.

Career Thoughts

Image courtesy Wikimedia.

Taking a break from the technical, career issues merit reflection and discussion. Here are some brief thoughts.

How's the Market?

What's your perception of the ASIC/EDA jobs market? My take is that it's pretty weak, but a number of companies are "selectively hiring". I had a couple of friends leave their struggling design services firm, and they were able to land jobs at established growing companies within a couple of months. On the other hand, there are plenty of engineers who have been looking for many months.

One differentiator is that hiring favors leading-edge experience (e.g., expert P&R and design closure of 65 or 45nm chips), or knowledge (e.g., advanced degree with an emphasis on an emerging hot area).

Natives Say No

With the depressed job market, this isn't the best time to wonder about this, but I'm perplexed at the lack of US-born chip design engineers. Of course, it stems from the lack of US-born engineering graduates. This leaves me scratching my head--engineering jobs are not THAT bad. As a matter of fact, they're one of the fastest ways to earn a very good paycheck out of college, with intellectual challenge to boot.

A downside is that engineering isn't the most secure career around. There are regular risks of downsizing or technological obsolescence. It's not a cushy career, but how many are in this age of globalization?

If you want a secure career, at least medicine and law are "less outsourcable". However, if you really want societal respect, security, and a guaranteed comfortable retirement, I recommend becoming a fireman.

Give US Your Best and Brightest

In the US, we are so fortunate to attract many of the best and brightest scientists and engineers from the rest of the world. There can be complaints about "H-1B abuse", but there needs to be a system that allows the country to benefit from the great contributions possible from immigrants with advanced degrees.

Where Do Seasoned Engineers Go?

While I'm not there yet, friends and I do wonder where all the full-career engineers are. Look around you -- do you see many 50-something engineers? I don't, and I wonder. Do they all transform into real estate agents? Or should I worry about a future as a Walmart greeter?

Others Weigh In

1. As I was preparing this post, a timely and provocative article appeared in EE Times, U.S. engineers at a disadvantage . The discussion in the comments is fascinating.
2. Update: Harry the ASIC Guy and his commenters weigh in on outsourcing, and IBM's aggressive program in particular.
3. Update: Lou Covey has analysis and advice at We're in this boat together. Start acting like it.

Everybody's Getting Physical

Image courtesy Wikimedia.

Back before "nanometer design", there was "deep submicron design", and ASIC synthesis users became very concerned about interconnect effects on timing. The first attempt to deal with this was through "Links to Layout", and especially a whole slew of custom wireload model (CWLM) strategies. If you look at SNUG programs a number of years ago, there were more CWLM papers than you could shake a stick at.

A major advance in accounting for interconnect effects was when synthesis tools started to perform "virtual layout" as part of the optimization-estimation-timing analysis loop. The most notable tool to do this was Synopsys Design Compiler Topographical. My colleagues and I did evaluations of DCT starting with 90nm designs, and data indicated better correlation and generally a better netlist for Place & Route.

As we progress from 90nm to 45nm and below, physical considerations are becoming ever more sophisticated. The latest examples are

• Synopsys Design Compiler Graphical. Includes congestion prediction and some congestion relief algorithms.
• Cadence RTL Compiler's New "Spatial Technology", the latest physically-aware RC feature.
• Oasys RealTime Designer. "RTL physical synthesis."

The Skeptic Weighs In

While "getting physical" has the feeling of more accuracy and general goodness, TNSTAAFL. Though I hope for better quality of results and predictability, I see the following drawbacks

• It forces the logic designer to learn physical design details, and learn new tools or coordinate with a physical designer. While that's nice to know, it takes away from the RTL creator's time to focus on architecture, design and verification.
• The optimization process itself will either take longer (to perform the "virtual layout"), or results will be less-optimal, because optimization time will be taken away in order to run physical algorithms.
• Some of the effort may be wasted, especially for detailed buffering and gate sizing. For example, some P&R tools "throw away" the incoming netlist's buffering and sizing, and re-optimize in the physical domain. So, that effort in logic synthesis is wasted (other than its predictive benefit).
• While WLM-based synthesis is well understood and mature, these physical tools are not. It may take a long refinement period for the tools to produce reliable netlist quality and consistency.
• Some of these tools can't decide if they're logic design tools, physical design tools, or some mish-mash of both. In their efforts to be accessible and affordable for logic designers, they may lack the physical design functions and data access needed to do the job right.

Over the coming months, advanced synthesis users will be putting these latest tools through their paces with real designs. And we'll start to learn whether the added complexity and cost leads to better implemented designs. If not, we can always go back to our old friend the wireload model, trying to get to P&R quickly, where the rubber really (not virtually) meets the road.

Update: I stumbled upon a detailed reply/rebuttal over on the Cadence Logic Design blog! Jeffrey Flieder, thanks for writing this. I very nearly overlooked it.

Found at DAC

My pre-DAC post Looking Forward to DAC laid out what I hoped to investigate by visiting exhibitors, namely

• Low Power
• Datapath
• MCMM
• parallelism
• Asynchronous Design

Well, despite my best-laid plans, I wasn't able to check all these items on my list in two days of roaming the exhibits floor. In some cases (i.e., Asynchronous Design), I didn't find an appropriate vendor. In other cases, my schedule or the vendor's appointment constraints didn't allow me to gather the information. But DAC was a great opportunity to see many vendors, and by careful plan or happy accident, I was able to visit many interesting companies. I'll group my vendor impressions into these categories:

High-Performance Design

• It seemed like Oasys Design Systems was the most talked-about implementation vendor at the show. As I've said before, their capacity and run time claims are incredible. At this show, they put a lot of emphasis on making their claims credible. They've got some customer testimonials to validate them, and their closed-door demo suite explains what's revolutionary about their physical synthesis approach, and why it could be dramatically faster than today's synthesis tools. Update: Harry the ASIC Guy explains technical details of Oasys' approach.

  And to top it all off, I just about ran into Joe Costello on the DAC floor. (He was suspiciously near the Synopsys booth at the time.) It should be great to have Joe back in the EDA industry. I like and respect Aart de Geus a great deal, but Joe Costello can add motivation and excitement back to an industry that's feeling tired.

• Micro Magic is an interesting small design/tools company that's been around almost 15 years. Because DAC wasn't very crowded on Wednesday, I could walk into their booth and have a long informal chat with their CEO. He exudes confidence and credibility.

  One of their tools is a Datapath Compiler, which is one of the few commercial solutions for maximum performance datapath design. Other companies have come and gone (Arcadia is long gone; Arithmatica wasn't at DAC), but Micro Magic apparently has numerous real success stories. (Their customers seldom allow themselves to be named.)

• iNoCs is an early stage startup with tools to synthesize Network on Chip (NoC) IP. Their debut was especially timely because NoC was one of the technologies featured in the Wednesday Keynote by Bill Dally, Stanford professor and NVIDIA Chief Scientist. As it turns out, the connection is even stronger. iNoCs is advised by noted EDA professor Giovanni De Micheli, who has been a colleague of Professor Dally.

Parallelism

• The only company I met with a heavy focus on new parallel computing products was ACCIT, which is developing highly accelerated SPICE simulators running on ATI GPUs. Looking forward to the NVIDIA CUDA port, guys!
• Of course, many of the big EDA vendors are adapting their products for multi-core technology, for example Synopsys PrimeTime Multicore.

ESL Synthesis

I spoke to a few vendors in this space, but I wouldn't dare pretend to have a good grasp on where the field is at. Several journalists and bloggers are writing "now is the time for ESL synthesis", but I have yet to meet the designers using it or even enthusiastic to get into it. It's puzzling to me. There apparently are specific domains with considerable success, such as wireless and image or video processing. And there are specific geographic areas adopting it first, namely Japan. But for the mainstream ASIC designer, I don't yet see it catching on.

Others

I liked what I heard in a brief visit with Imera, which develops hardware+software solutions to allow secure remote debug of software (e.g. EDA tools). In my work, there is constant antagonism between the EDA vendor, whose engineers claims they cannot debug their software beyond their walls versus the EDA customer, which doesn't want the "company jewels" of full-chip RTL or netlists to ftp over to the EDA vendor. Imera has solved the problem with a distributed debugger and networking solution that allows the R&D engineer to debug from the vendor side, while the EDA tool is running on the design data at the customer's site. Sounds like it would resolve the stalemate and allow us to get on with the problem-solving.

Overall Impressions

I had not attended DAC since 2006. It was a little disorienting because of all the changes in the industry and the conference itself. Attendance was way down from boom times. For the first time, I had an "exhibits only" pass, which allowed me to go up every day and visit the exhibits floor but not the technical program. After Free Monday, the floor was much less crowded, and it was a pleasure to walk right up to any vendor and get all my questions answered. One irritating practice of several vendors was to not have any open demos, but to require a one-hour appointment to be scheduled for a closed-door meeting. I found this quite inconvenient for any sort of spontaneous discovery, and as a result both vendors and I missed out on some worthwhile discussions.

I was glad I attended DAC. I obtained information that will help me in my job, and met old and new friends. I wish for the sake of the organizers and the exhibitors that attendance had been stronger, but the economy was a strong tide to fight. Let's hope that tide is turning and the 47th DAC in Anaheim will celebrate a growing vital EDA industry.