How do we promote electrical engineering when we're surrounded by an increasingly software & solution based world? Microcontrollers and increasingly so, full-blown microprocessor system-on-chip designs integrate a bedazzling array of top-notch analog and digital peripherals. Watching electronics parts catalogs, there's an ever growing profusion of special-purpose ICs, a low cost on hand solution to every problem. And in this state of being well served, I'm curious how we maintain proficiency, expertise,
The other AC commenter is mostly right. EE is dead in the western world, for the most part. You can still make a career there, but it's not easy, because most of the work is being outsourced to Asia now. When companies design products using those microcontrollers and SoCs you talk about, these days they usually send them over to an ODM in Taiwan to be both designed and manufactured there, with the software part being considered the "trade secret" part, and kept in-house here in the US. There's still small companies doing their own hardware design, but it's drying up, plus working at small companies usually means a meager salary.
The exception to this is if you're interested in being an RTL designer, i.e. designing circuits in VHDL and Verilog. Those fancy SoCs you talk about are usually designed here in the US by people with EE degrees. That's where all the EE work has moved: on-chip. But it's mostly digital, done in HDLs, and as such isn't really that different from software. So if you're interested in designing SoCs, then by all means go get a EE degree so you can work at one of the many semiconductor companies in the US, such as Intel, AMD, Freescale, Atmel, Microchip, Marvell, etc. But if you want to design board-level electronics, either look for another profession for your "day job", or be prepared for a much narrower job market, either working at a poorly-managed small company in Bumblefuck for peanuts, or maybe working at one of those large semiconductor companies as an applications engineer.
Hardware in the days of software (Score:2)
How do we promote electrical engineering when we're surrounded by an increasingly software & solution based world? Microcontrollers and increasingly so, full-blown microprocessor system-on-chip designs integrate a bedazzling array of top-notch analog and digital peripherals. Watching electronics parts catalogs, there's an ever growing profusion of special-purpose ICs, a low cost on hand solution to every problem. And in this state of being well served, I'm curious how we maintain proficiency, expertise,
Re:Hardware in the days of software (Score:2)
The other AC commenter is mostly right. EE is dead in the western world, for the most part. You can still make a career there, but it's not easy, because most of the work is being outsourced to Asia now. When companies design products using those microcontrollers and SoCs you talk about, these days they usually send them over to an ODM in Taiwan to be both designed and manufactured there, with the software part being considered the "trade secret" part, and kept in-house here in the US. There's still small companies doing their own hardware design, but it's drying up, plus working at small companies usually means a meager salary.
The exception to this is if you're interested in being an RTL designer, i.e. designing circuits in VHDL and Verilog. Those fancy SoCs you talk about are usually designed here in the US by people with EE degrees. That's where all the EE work has moved: on-chip. But it's mostly digital, done in HDLs, and as such isn't really that different from software. So if you're interested in designing SoCs, then by all means go get a EE degree so you can work at one of the many semiconductor companies in the US, such as Intel, AMD, Freescale, Atmel, Microchip, Marvell, etc. But if you want to design board-level electronics, either look for another profession for your "day job", or be prepared for a much narrower job market, either working at a poorly-managed small company in Bumblefuck for peanuts, or maybe working at one of those large semiconductor companies as an applications engineer.