[concorde24]

Hello everyone,
Great to be a part of this wonderful community !!

To introduce myself, I am presently in Chennai for last 4 years and had been working in Bangalore earlier for 12+ years. My native is madurai and I end up travelling between these three cities. My first car was Santro Zipdrive which i acquired in 2005 (from Trident pre-owned division in Indira Nagar, Bangalore). Had driven for around 6 years and upgraded to a Swift Dzire (PMAW, Petrol, Vxi). It's been 5 years fabulous journey with the car and presently looking for an upgrade in entry SUV segment. I am seeking a car with all safety features (ABS/Airbags) and tall stance (I am 6'2" tall). I have presently shortlisted Ecosport, Creta (Petrol) and Brezza as options and in progress of test-drive/research.

I am an electronics engineer by profession working in semiconductor (VLSI/Hardware) industry. I have been fortunate enough to work on the latest generation of processors powering up many smartphones. Also recently i have been working an a chipset which powers the ICE/Navigational module in a car. I was really surprised by amount of testing an automotive chip undergoes before landing to a car compared to a chip ending in a household appliance. To provide an comparison, the average time in design for a mobile chipset is 6-9 months whereas it takes a minimum 2+ years qualification cycle for an Auto grade chipset.

Since my childhood, i have been fascinated by fast bikes/automobiles. My nickname is concorde and really happy to have concorde24 as my team-bhp handle. I have been an user of this community for some time and kudos to the moderators and enterprising members for breadth and depth of knowledge shared. I hope to participate and learn from this forum.

[ampere]

Great to see you online. Its amazing to see the amount electronics in automobiles these days.

Here is a thread that you will like:

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/car-e...-outdated.html (OEM ICE User Interfaces: Why so outdated?)

[searchingheaven]

Originally Posted by concorde24

I am an electronics engineer by profession working in semiconductor (VLSI/Hardware) industry. I have been fortunate enough to work on the latest generation of processors powering up many smartphones. Also recently i have been working an a chipset which powers the ICE/Navigational module in a car.

I really admire you guys. Electronics is an ubiquitous component of every device that we use in our general and professional lives. Could you give us a slightly detailed account of what you do as a VLSi engineer?

My nickname is concorde and really happy to have concorde24 as my team-bhp handle.

Nice name to have. Any stories associated with it or something? Or was it given arbitrarily?

[concorde24]

Originally Posted by searchingheaven

I really admire you guys. Electronics is an ubiquitous component of every device that we use in our general and professional lives. Could you give us a slightly detailed account of what you do as a VLSi engineer?

Thanks for your kind words searchingheaven. As a VLSI engineer we are involved in creating System-On-Chip [SoC] devices perform all the functionalities required for a particular function. For Eg, earlier we had multiple discrete components from various vendors put-together for achieving functionality. But recently with advancements in semiconductor processing and shrinking process nodes (14nm/10nm) etc, we are able to put more and more logic together in a single piece of a Silicon Chip achieve performance and power benefits.

But this increasing complexity has side effects too - we need to ensure that with increasing clock speed, more number of CPU cores etc. power and thermal limits also needs to be considered. So the VLSI industry has multiple domains - Design, Verification, Design for testability, Physical design, Emulation & Validation, Embedded software development etc focusing on every aspect.

Also once the device is fabricated in foundry (Taiwan/China), they are loaded in machines for checking the functionality before releasing to customers. There are multiple teams involved in functionality verification, reliability, Fault analysis and yield improvement.

VLSI industry has lot of investment compared to normal Software, but with the volume of chipsets running in millions, they are usually profitable. Else the small companies get acquired by bigger ones to achieve economies of scale.

Hope this was able to provide insight, let me know if you have more questions.

[Vid6639]

Welcome aboard concorde24. Good to have another petrol head and a semiconductor guy.

Originally Posted by concorde24

Also once the device is fabricated in foundry (Taiwan/China), they are loaded in machines for checking the functionality before releasing to customers. There are multiple teams involved in functionality verification, reliability, Fault analysis and yield improvement.

The machines for checking functionality known as ATE's is where I work on. We test the latest 14nM and now 10nM chips for entire functionality on ATE.

After the engineering is over we then release it for production testing and then work on yield improvement.