Comment by rubylark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubylark | Hacker News Reader

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My brother and several of his friends do this for a living at Intel. Most of them have Electrical Engineering PhDs, though I believe one is a Chemical Engineer. My brother's thesis specifically was in 2d transistor design and worked under a Material Science professor. I believe most universities have professors who teach Semiconductors classes, whether it is under the name Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Chemical Engineering, or Material Science.

It would be difficult to learn on your own as explained in the article: you need a lot of specialized equipment, a high class of clean room, and a lot of very dangerous chemicals. (My brother once described what the hydrofluoric acid he used semi-regularly does to person and completely horrified our parents).

Downside of this field is that there are very few job opportunities without relocating. If you're in the US, you can work at Intel... or Intel. Unless you're willing to move to Taiwan and work at TSMC.

Hydrofluoric acid and other "fluorinating" chemicals like chlorine trifluoride really are horrific. Most of my experience in chemistry is from a brief stint working as a student helper in an undergrad chemistry lab, and (thankfully) never encountered HF, but we were told many times just how dangerous it is.

It's been a while, but I remember the biggest danger isn't the acidity itself, not even being a strong acid, but fluorine's tendency to "deep dive". It just sort of slowly eats into things and creates layers that are comparatively hard to remove. So if you spill hydrochloric acid or whatever on yourself, you wash it off, maybe get some severe tissue damage, but it's localized and washes off.

On the other hand, the HF tends to stick around, and as a fun side-effect, the fluoride salts it creates are poisonous to the body. And HF is tame compared to some fluorine chemicals used in chip etching/production...

> Downside of this field is that there are very few job opportunities without relocating. If you're in the US, you can work at Intel... or Intel. Unless you're willing to move to Taiwan and work at TSMC.

Only if we're talking specifically about cutting edge logic. There's Texas Instruments and GlobalFoundries in the US on the trailing edge for logic. In memory, where the fabrication techniques are similar, there's Micron, IMFT in Utah, and Samsung in Texas. Not to mention that TSMC is building a leading edge logic fab in Arizona.

And then of course there are all of the capital equipment suppliers, where the US punches way above its weight. Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA are all headquartered in California and employ a lot of the same talent that Intel does.

I was a bit hyperbolic in my statement, mainly because I was parroting some dinner table conversations. However your list is still fairly short and few are in the same location. If you say, get a PhD in the Midwest in EE specializing in novel transistor fabrication techniques, you likely will have to move states to get a job in the area of your expertise. And if you are unhappy in your job for any reason, you will have to move again to work for a different "big name" company.

I guess the point I was trying to make in my trite (and I admit, inaccurate) statement was that it's not as accessible of a career path as, say, coding. It's more like becoming a rocket scientist: there are very few companies to pick from in that field. And they're not typically in the same place geographically.

There are other fabs in the US - Samsung, Global Foundries, NXP, and other smaller places.

Also, if you want to be a "chip designer" then you can work for a fabless company too. They're basically everywhere.

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