I graduated 5 years ago with a degree in computer engineering, and have been working since then in embedded systems for satellites/aerospace. Currently I’m finishing a masters in CS with a thesis in cache prefetching. I started the masters because I decided aerospace is probably not the place for me (salary is okay but not stellar, very high inertia, hardest problems are not control systems and signal processing rather than software). I loved computer architecture in undergrad, and I think getting a job at a newer fabless chip company like SiFive or Tenstorrent would be amazing, but I am wary of all the warnings I read from people in the field. Is there anybody here with industry experience who has something good to say about working on the fabless side of things?
There’s an absolute shedload of opportunity, for one thing. I run a job board for people who design chips and RTL for FPGAs. The pay is good and all companies are hiring RTL designers.
For another, plenty of people who do it love it. This probably isn’t the place to connect with them. I’d recommend /r/fpga or /r/chipdesign on Reddit.
(That job board is www.fpgajobs.com if you're curious.)
Thanks for the suggestion! As someone with little job experience doing FPGA work (just a single internship and university research), is it that hard to get an offer that’s not extremely junior level? I’m hoping to leverage my embedded experience for a role that involves firmware or OS work.
Lots of folks are starting to leverage hybrid FPGA/ARM chips, like the Xilinx Zynq series. Folks who work with these typically get pretty involved in both embedded development and RTL, as part of the challenge is figuring out what segment of compute lives where in those types of systems.
There are plenty of places who'd take a decent firmware engineer and then allow them to learn the gateware portion through absorption.
A master's in this area also is a good way to break in. Defense companies tend to value it pretty highly.
