Work

I work at [ PMC-Sierra, Inc ] in Santa Clara, CA. I design telecommunications chips. I've heard it said around the office that 80% of internet traffic passes through one of our chips. That's nice and all, but the dot-com bust and the telecom meltdown still hurts.

So what does a Product Design Engineer do?

Well, to make a chip, first we have to figure out what the chip has to do. This requires lots of meetings with marketing and our customers. When we have a technical specification, we can go ahead and start architecting it. We look at our requirements and come up with a design that would make it work. Usually, a divide-and-conquer method works best: divide the problem up into manageable blocks. That way you can give one block to one designer, and if you detail out how that designer's block has to talk to another designer's block, you can wire together the whole chip with very little effort.

Once we know what we have to do, we do it. We start coding in a special programming language (called VHDL) that can describe digital logic designs. Digital logic is just a way of making decisions -- "if x is true then do this, but if x is false, then do that." You can encode true to be a '1' and false to be a '0', that makes it digital. Then if you encode the '1' to be 5 volts and 0 to be 0 volts, you can use electricity to build a circuit that can be made into a computer chip.

Once we've gotten done coding it all up, we have to synthesize it, that is turn our code into the digital logic I just mentioned. That's actually a difficult problem if you want a fast or efficient design. Once it's synthesized, we hand our work over to the layout group, whose job it is to map out our digital logic into a form that can be turned into a chip. Once the layout group is done, their work will be sent off to the fabrication factory to be manufactured.

While all this is going on, the verification team is very busy making sure everything in our design works right. If they find a bug, we have to fix it before we send our chip off to be manufactured. If you have to fix a bug in a chip that's already gone to the manufacturers, it can easily cost $500k.

So that's what I do, in a (large & nontechnical) nutshell.

Our stock ticker symbol is [ PMCS ]. Don't look at the 5-year graph, it's depressing.

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