Working in electronics engineering

In this Agile Analog blog post for World Engineering Day I explain why I love working in electronics engineering, talk about our unique Composa technology and share some advice for young engineers starting out.

Engineering challenges

As a child I loved taking things apart - especially things that weren’t supposed to come apart! I enjoyed science at school and I was fortunate that I found that it made sense to me. When it came time for university, I considered my options. To me maths and physics seemed too abstract and I wanted to do something that was closer to real-life and I could actually see in action. I thought about medicine for a while, but then I chose to study engineering.

For over 20 years I have been part of the semiconductor sector, managing teams dedicated to chip and IP development at start-ups and large companies such as Samsung and Qualcomm. Designing and developing chips is a complex process and speed of decision-making is key. In fact, many issues require answers and fixes in hours. There can be a lot of pressure as your team members need you to keep their stuff working 24/7!

I have learnt that the vast majority of electronics engineering is done based on unknowns and huge uncertainty. There is rarely a right answer - it's about navigating challenges to make things work. Sometimes this means coming up with a complex solution, sometimes simplicity is best and it's a question of telling your customer perhaps they don't really need everything they have asked for!

Overseeing Composa

As VP of Composa Engineering at Agile Analog I oversee the team that develops our unique technology tool. Composa automatically builds our analog IP solutions to each customer’s exact specifications - for the foundry, process and node of their choice. Composa accepts the process development kits (PDKs) of all the major foundries, solving the problem of portability of analog IP that has traditionally required re-engineering to fit each silicon process technology.

Composa generates analog IP against any foundry PDK and it is straightforward to switch to a different foundry or shrink the chip to a smaller node. My job is to try to make sure my colleagues have everything they need to do their job. That might be providing a set of requirements or just the space to focus on a specific issue. I am always looking for new ways to improve how the Composa team and the technology works.

At Agile Analog, we are enabling a completely new approach to creating analog IP. Ensuring it actually works for everyone and how they want is much harder than just making it! We have a really wide range of technologies we use and disciplines we cross. In particular, disciplines that never normally talk to each other. So, helping "translate" between them is fascinating. We don't solve the same problem over and over again. Thanks to Composa we can solve it once and deliver it over and over again. Making that work well and easily is an exciting challenge.

Rewarding career

Engineering has an important role to play in the modern world. To young engineers beginning their career I would give a couple of bits of advice. Firstly - remember that the world is not comprised of rights and wrongs, there are no past papers with the answers. Most problems are about finding the least-worst answer not the correct answer! Secondly, whilst it is important to understand and grow your own area of engineering expertise, working in different engineering disciplines to learn how these support each other can be invaluable.

I have really enjoyed my career so far and it has been a pleasure collaborating with some incredible people - many of whom are still my closest friends. I would highly recommend working in electronics engineering as it is very rewarding.

If you are seeking a new electronics engineering challenge, keep an eye on the Agile Analog Careers web pages.