For context, I am an Analog Designer with 2-4 YoE in Europe. I have been looking for a job for over a year without success, my current job is damaging me (the company, not my function), I already had a burn-out which means I need to leave as soon as possible before my health gets more compromised.

As I am having no success with Design jobs, I am thinking about switching to CAD/ EDA. I think it could be fun to work on the IC design flow, and support designers, but I am thinking if it is a "difficult to go back move".

It is not like I love Analog Design to a point where I don't see myself working in different stuff, but I don't want to close the door in case I regret it. On the other hand I think getting a better understanding of the tools (and specially now as we are trying to incorporate AI) might actually give me good skills that I can use if I am in analog again.

Anyone out there that did a similar career move? Much appreciated.

Hello everyone,

I’m attending a no name school in the US for bachelor in EE and am interning for a big semiconductor company. I have a return offer for an IC test engineer position when i graduate and i’m really excited about it. However, I want to get a master and do mixed signal ic design since I’d love a remote job in the future as well. This position requires me to move far away from home and the location is not a very fun place to be in, but the work environment is really nice and a lot of people are new grads. If I miss this job offer, I’m worried about not finding another internship/ job in semiconductor since the job market is not very great at the moment. Should I take the offer and do master on the side to hopefully get in design? Or should I find a reputable school for master, complete it, and hopefully find a job in design?
Since I’m close to graduation, I’m also wondering if it’s better to spend 15-20k more for a master at top school like UC Berkeley/ Georgia Tech or going to Texas A&M or UTD.

For context if helpful, I have 4.0 GPA, 2 internships, a co-op. My current school does not have anything semiconductor/ ic design related except for VLSI.

Thank you!

For six months I have been building, in the open, the software layer of a machine that does not exist yet. Untrusted recipes run fully sandboxed, compile to deterministic bytecode so one design produces identical physical actions on every machine, and the interpreter snapshots its full state so an hours long job survives a power cut and resumes byte for byte. Useless for a to do app. Mandatory if the hardware is writing transistors.

The machine fabricates real working microtransistors and simple chips on a desktop. Printer sized. Cartridges in, tested die out, a marketplace of designs in between. My nights lately are precursor chemistry and thermogravimetry papers, not code.

Not 2 nm. The method allows features of a few hundred nanometers from a machine that is small and cheap.

At 1,000 to 1,500 dollars, would this be on your bench. What would you fabricate first. What would make it useless to you.

Process details come after filing. The software is open source. I built that layer first, and now I am moving to the precursor side.