The idea behind The Future Framework is to help freshers (or anyone honestly) discover ‘hidden gem’ of fields that are highly crucial but not very well known. Knowing about such fields will help them take their first steps towards making a high-impact career in them.
This article is sponsored by Rotary Club of Mumbai Dahisar along with Rotaract Club of Dahisar Coast and Rotaract Club of Borivali Heights.
About the speaker – you Rohit Viswans Is presently, the Chief engineering and manufacturing officer at Ampere Computing. In the past, Rohit sir has been the Director of Engineering for Intel Architecture Group – India, followed by, the Director of engineering for Intel’s Atom products and subsequently the Vice President of Platform Engineering for Intel group of companies globally.
Q1 – Could you tell us about your beginning in the semiconductor sector?
Rohit completed his high schooling at King George, Dadar and then attended college at Ruparel Matunga. He was lucky enough to be in the very first electronics batch of RuparelCollege and that is really where his interest in electronics and computer engineering began. However, his first access to PCs was after Ruparel College when his father sent him overseas to the US for his undergraduate degree in computer engineering. After his undergrad, he wanted to do further studies in the same field, so he decided to take a master’sdegree in the same field. He started as an entry-level engineer at Intel right after it.
It was exciting for him to be part of a small team of fresh engineers where he could really jump in and start learning so many things from the more experienced engineers in the team. The series of preceding events got the momentum going for him to continue excelling and developing a long career in this field of a chip design and platform engineering.
Fundamentals needed to be doing well in this industry is really a good strong foundation in math and science without that you really can’t develop the deep expertise you need in designing chips and in hardware engineering and platforms.
The chip building journey involves, first, market research on what is expected of the chip followed by building and designing the chip architecture (including writing the softwarewhich enables it to perform) using multiple cutting-edge tools, then manufacturing the chip after which it is rigorously tested before it can be mass manufactured and shipped with devices.
Q2 – Where are these chips/microprocessors used? And which are some of the up and coming applications that are witnessing a significant increment in chip usage?
Literally if you look around your house in your kitchen every electronic device that you see has some sort of chip in. Whether it’s the front panel of microwave to your mixer. They are used in industrial machines too where chips collect data for preventive maintenance. You’ll also find chips in the medical field, robotics, 4G and 5G too are tied to silicon chips.
Areas of growth include autonomous driving. There are chips in the automobiles today doing basic agent control,monitoring your fuel level, or helping with the navigation system with the media for music playback and things like that. You can see almost every automobile company an investing a lot of money getting to autonomous car driving andautonomous trucks too.
Other big application includes factories – about 30-40% of the top factories have now deployed intelligent machines with chips. There are so many factories around the world that havenot really embraced such intelligent machinery.
Another big area is the concept of artificial intelligence and machine learning on how you are taking all the data that you have out there and really identify patterns through the data. The machine is going to predict what may happen in that situation. Weather reporting, weather monitoring, quick reporting and monitoring and signal early warnings are all applications.
Semiconductors are getting applied into lot of the pharmaceutical areas. A great example being the mRNA vaccines that got so quickly made is directly tied it to the foundational machine learning capabilities of those companies.
IOT (the technology that enables devices to talk to one another) too extensively use chips.
Q3 – ARM and x86 – Arm is simpler and easily tailorable, consumes lesser and now the performance has been improved. What is all the buzz about and what the significant changes taking place?
x86 came first and is used by intel and AMD. 25-30 yearsback, another company defined ARM architecture. ARM was simpler to implement, low power and so was used in mobile phones. x86 wouldn’t do well in a cell phone since it would take up too much power and you’d want the battery to last for a day at least. x86 is largely used in PCs and servers.
Extensive research and development have led to advancements in chip making with ARM technology. Hi powered arm chips can now be used within datacenters. Companies like Ampere computing are making these chips for data centers. A data center could have a thousand systems running. With an arm-based chip they might be able to run 1200 or 1500 systems while consuming the same amount of power. They can deliver 20% better performance while consuming 30% less energy. It helps the TCO (total cost of ownership goes down) for a data center go down.
Demand for chips in various areas has grown very fast and the supply side (design, production, manufacturing) hasn’t been able to keep up. One chip factory can require an investment of$5 billion and 3 years to be up and running. TSMC has announced they will invest $100 billion in expanding their capacity.
Q4 – Could you tell us about some of your learnings that you’ve had along your journey?
The willingness to ask questions. Always ask questions and do not operate within your own silo. It will help you learn faster. Always take interest in learning about new areas within your field. Further, take ownership of any work you do or any project you work on.
Failing is okay. And inevitable, if you are attempting something for the first time.
It takes years to build an expertise. People often expect to work for 12 and 18 months and be experts in their fields. It simply doesn’t work that way. You have to spend time to build that deep expertise. If you quit too soon, you’ll end up being a jack of all trades.
Find good mentors. It doesn’t matter how senior you are. You could be the vice president of a company and still have a mentor. Mentors help guide the way, bounce around ideas and weigh the pros and cons of different choices.
Be in different roles and work in different locations. Working in different countries teaches you about different work cultures and people, and helps you gain the experience to be an effective global leader.
Q5 – How do you see India’s role shaping up in this field?
Since chip manufacturing plants require heavy infrastructure and take 3-4 years for their setup, it might still be find before we can find them in India. Although the Indian government has plans around chip manufacturing too.
India is and will continue to be a source of human capital for this industry.
Spectrum of different opportunities include, tool development(tools used for making the chips), chip design, hardware design and software.
Careers include – designers, software engineers that can make the tools to make the chips, core engineering, chip engineers and design services.
The opportunities are exponential. The packages too that even freshers receive within this field are exponentially high.
Q6 – Is a degree required to work in the chip industry or can someone learn online and start in it?
To work in chip design or platform engineering you require a strong foundation of electronics. Even on the software end, an understanding of how chips work is required. This can be very difficult to learn online since it is very niche and an in depth understanding is required.
Having said that, you need to have an engineering degree to make a career in this fields.
About the Interviewees
- Rtr. Shreyans Jain is part of Rotaract Club of Dahisar Coast. He is currently working at Deloitte India as a Data Scientist.
- Rtr. Darsh Bijoor is part of Rotaract Club of Borivali Heights. He is currently working at Finovate Capital as Growth & Strategy Expert.
Shreyans’ Blog 