Work.... What the feck do I do ...

Once in a while, somebody asks me : "What do you do for a living ?" ....

And they usually meant what do you in front of a computer, outside of tweeting and posting on Facebook....
Well my job does indeed consists of  spending loads of time in front of a computer screen.

My work station in the Irish office.

But to do what, you should ask... well for the past almost 10 years, I have been a Physical Integration Engineer. Very pompous title indeed, but basically it's one of the fundamental part in chip design.

First a bit of generic background on how electronic chips are made ( http://www.intel.com/about/companyinfo/museum/exhibits/sandtocircuits/index.htm ) :




As for my part the physical integration - or layout -, it  does the translation of  the system description in some programming language into a graphic representation (the layout) which will be used to produce the chip in the factory. Or: Chip design involves migrating a design from the logical realm (front-end design) to the
physical realm (back-end design).

The microelectronic chip are made of tiny - and getting tinier as the years passes - transistors, laid out on a silicon sheet. The process used involve photolithograhy - very similar to the development on photographic films - and used masks. Which masks I am helping creating.

An inverter and it's layout equivalent

When I started I was doing Analog Layout, so the conversion progress was highly manual, as someone put it, drawing rectangles of different colors representing the different layers ( or mask ) which were going to create the transistors and connections. Somehow i always found that it had some artistic touch, and I have to say most of the good very experienced engineers I met in that field were crazy - to some extend.
The job can also lead to some Chip Art. Sadly i have no pictures of the doodles I may or may not have inserted in past chips.

Since I moved to Digital stuff, where actually some program do layout the rectangles for you, and you're controlling those programs ( or trying to ). The idea here is to automate as much as possible the layout process, and ensuring the timing and other rules are respected.
The basic knowledge how mask design, and what are the physical impacts is still needed, but the tasks there are more programming or at least scripts writing, not too offense the software people.

Further reading on chip art:

• An interesting gallery online of these disappearing features: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/micro/gallery.html
• A IEEE Spectrum article on Chip Art:
  http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-secret-art-of-chip-graffiti

And on Physical Design:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_design_(electronics)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_design