Semiconductor News

Trying to create more gender parity in your organization is a tough but worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, gender bias— even if it’s not intended— is quite common in the tech and chip industry, where organizations tend to promote and favor masculine actions and behavior. Negative peer pressure, harassment, and skewed representation of women who pursue careers in STEM fields are also major problems in workplaces and the culture at large. There’s no denying that women face and experience unique barriers to success. But many are making strides that shatter the glass ceiling and prove that female engineers, developers, or scientists are crucial to innovation and creative problem-solving.

Sometimes things don’t go quite as planned. You commit to checking off a few tasks for the day, and suddenly a change to the budget or revision in the project brief takes you back to square one. What was supposed to be a clear and straightforward project now requires longer development times, more resources, or aggressive deadlines. The productive day you wished for took a turn didn’t expect. This phenomenon, called scope creep, happens to the best of us.

Chip engineers in small teams are often knee-deep in a wide range of different tasks and projects. From client management and design layout to data analysis and testing, they have their work cut out for them. The mantra “do more with less” has become a popular strategy for running lean teams in many semiconductor companies. While this approach saves time and money, engineers may risk quality, productivity, and performance.

This scenario plays out all too often in high-performing design teams when engineering leaders lose sight of purpose, processes, and people. Deadlines get aggressive, development times are uncertain, and the results become questionable. The price to pay is immense, and companies can’t afford to fall short on testing, especially when pattern generation (PG) is on the line. So what do you do?

New technology has a way of keeping us on our toes with impressive advanced features and architecture. But this innovation also creates new challenges that ratchets up the need for top talent. But for veteran and new engineers alike, that raises the question: what skills do engineers need to keep up?

Engineers can bring a lot to the table with a good balance of soft and hard skills. However, growth and mastery in any career field requires continuous learning and practice. In our article, we’ll explore which in-demand engineering skill sets are expected to grow in 2019.

Any engineer knows that coding, testing, and designing products requires intense concentration. “Being in the zone” is critical for many engineering tasks as juggling several variables in your head demand laser focus. Engineers in this state of flow— where knowledge, motivation, and focus all magically align— can produce more quality work in a single afternoon than in days of non-flow.

But as most engineers also know, this state of flow is elusive. As soon as you buckle down to do engineering work, intrusions may shift your attention. Before you know it, you’re waist-deep in two or three other unanticipated tasks. In an era of endless Slack messages and open workspaces, we’re bombarded by distractions. In reality, doing real engineering work can seem few and far between when interruptions are pulling you away from complete focus on important projects.

Looking over past year’s stories, it should be clear to anyone that the semiconductor industry encountered big wins and new challenges in 2018. The industry enjoyed consistent revenue growth, new machine learning models tackled creative artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the Internet of Things continued to profoundly change the way we interact with tech. But with these all new inventions and knowledge, the potential is just starting.

The smell of pine trees, patches of fresh snow, and brightly lit decorations mean the winter holidays are just around the corner. But exciting industry happenings aren’t over yet. As we near the end of 2018, let’s look back at the top events and news to take place in the semiconductor space.

In this article, we’ll give you the latest rundown of industry news and breakthroughs that happened in the fourth quarter of 2018.

After months of recruiting and hiring top engineering candidates, it’s finally the time of year where you can look forward to a well-deserved break. But while the holidays are a great time to cash in those vacation days, it’s also a golden opportunity to discover and hire the best candidates.

Don’t let the best engineering candidates go cold over the holidays. With less competition and a dedicated candidate pool in the winter season, it makes good business sense to maximize your efforts before you ring in the new year. Stay proactive and finish the year off strong by adopting these tactics into your holiday hiring agenda.

The number of great technical candidates has risen and fallen a lot throughout the years. Nowadays, the talent search isn’t easy; hiring managers have to stay laser-focused on filling critical open roles productively and efficiently or risk losing the best candidates to competitors.

At the Talent CIRCUIT, we take strong measures to select, interview, and qualify candidates to build a talent repository focused on the chip industry. The result? A list of highly competent candidates available when you need them.

Through our research and data, we uncovered popular roles and candidate pools to keep on your radar for future projects. Let’s explore some of the top engineering talent and in-demand roles we have available in the CIRCUIT to help you refresh your hiring pipeline.

It’s the third round of interviews, and you’re close to making an offer with a top engineering candidate. But the odds of sealing the deal with the best candidate might slip through your fingers. In a candidate-driven market, they’re weighing their options between offers. As companies race to snag the best engineers, what can you do?