Semiconductor Careers Guide

Chip companies hire for many roles across manufacturing, development, design and quality. For each role, this guide explains the work and the fields worth learning, whether you are preparing for a job search or a new assignment.

• Process EngineerEngineers who set up, improve and keep stable the front-end steps, such as deposition, etching and lithography, that build transistors and wiring on the wafer.
• Equipment EngineerEngineers who keep fab tools running to specification through maintenance, troubleshooting and tool installation. Some work in chipmakers' fabs; others work for equipment makers supporting customer fabs.
• Yield and Quality EngineerEngineers who raise the share of good chips per wafer (yield) by tracking down the causes of failures through data and analysis, and turn them into process improvements and stable quality.
• Device EngineerEngineers who design the structure of transistors and other devices, measure and evaluate the electrical characteristics of prototypes, and turn them into models for circuit design.
• Process Integration EngineerEngineers who link many process steps into a manufacturing flow that makes the device work as intended overall. They play a central role when new technology generations and products are introduced.
• Reliability EngineerEngineers who verify and assure that products keep working without failure over their service life, using accelerated stress tests and analysis of failure mechanisms.
• Test EngineerEngineers who develop the tests, run on automatic test equipment (ATE), that check whether chips work to specification at wafer level and after packaging, balancing quality against test cost.
• Packaging EngineerEngineers who design packages and run the assembly processes that connect a chip to the outside world and protect it from heat, mechanical stress and moisture, including advanced packages that combine several chips.
• Digital Design and Verification EngineerEngineers who design logic in a hardware description language, verify it by simulation and take it through logic synthesis and timing analysis to become a chip.
• Analog Design EngineerEngineers who design circuits that handle continuous voltages and currents, such as amplifiers, data converters and power circuits, with attention down to transistor characteristics and layout.