Snapdragon Buggy?

3D ICs Have a History

Steve’s Improbable History of 3D ICs? Six decades of 3D electronic packaging | EDA360 Insider is a great quick history (with pictures!) of 3-dimensional chips (actually, going back to the vacuum tube days).

Practical takeaway: stacked memory is clearly one of the killer apps for 21st-century 3D IC assembly.

SNUG Silicon Valley 2012 CFP

The Call for Papers is OPEN for SNUG Silicon Valley!

If you're a Synopsys tool user, please consider submitting a paper today for presentation at SNUG Silicon Valley. You can propose a paper by filling out a form and writing an abstract. Besides benefiting the engineering community at large, you'll develop your professional skills and raise your profile. We on the Tech Committee will help you!

Please visit the Call for Papers Web Page to check it out and submit your idea.

Career Fodder

I'm thinking to write a post on immigration and careers, but for now let me point you to two provocative articles I recently read:

• Steve Jobs's Advice for Obama. While I love the acronym: the Staple Act (Stopping Trained in America Ph.D.s from Leaving the Economy), the article also claims that Steve Jobs told Mr. Obama that Apple employs 700,000 factory workers in China because it can't find the 30,000 engineers in the U.S. that it needs on site at its plants. "If you could educate these engineers," he said at the dinner, "we could move more manufacturing jobs here." Quite a claim!
• Non-engineer-staffed IEEE-USA sells out US electrical engineering jobs, a forum post on SemiWiki.com, sparks an excellent debate about US engineering grad schools, H1B and "green cards", and career prospects for American engineers (and their children).