r/ECE • u/ChairGodIsGreat • May 31 '26

CAREER Is the semiconductor field over saturated or a good prospect.

Hey guys. Senior in highschool going to study ECE at a T10 university in America this fall and I think I want to go into semiconductor field/computer architecture. I’m not sure what part yet as it’s incredibly broad, and there’s design snd VLSI, or the physics side, or manufacturing, or RF.

I see so many posts about people getting one job off of 200 applications, and how the computer engineering field is super cutthroat right now, so I’m wondering if I am making a mistake joining this field right now (I don’t want to have the job market of a CS major).

Chips in America are on the up and up though, so maybe there is hope?

15 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

28

u/Fun-Size-4295 May 31 '26

Right now basically every market is saturated, so don’t let the market discourage and plus hardware currently is lacking good talent

0

u/ChairGodIsGreat May 31 '26

What exactly do you mean by hardware?

-7

u/megafireguy6 May 31 '26

He means that all the guys with the intelligence and interest to do well in tech go to software bc the pay to effort ratio is higher, and it’s the been the trendy thing to do the past few years. Meanwhile sectors like IC and PCB design are much easier to obtain job in due to the higher bar for entry. (especially with analog IC design, shit basically requires a PhD from a top 15 school)

18

u/UnseenTardigrade May 31 '26

So it's both easy to obtain a job and also basically requires a PhD from a top 15 school? That's not contradictory at all...

8

u/megafireguy6 May 31 '26

My bad, that does seem a bit contradictory. I mean that it’s a higher bar to clear, but if you do clear it, you’re gonna be competing with much fewer people than in software

2

u/NuttyCrawdad Jun 02 '26

My friend got a RF IC design job with a bachelors

0

u/megafireguy6 Jun 02 '26

Fr? Mind sharing what school he went to, that’s a pretty rare feat.

2

u/NuttyCrawdad Jun 02 '26

MST, he did an internship at the company and they liked him a lot.

0

u/ChairGodIsGreat May 31 '26

Ahhh ok makes sense.

-9

u/JollyToby0220 Jun 01 '26

Hardware is terrible, not a lot of companies are doing hardware because computers aren’t very popular anymore. Maybe your work computer. That’s all been replaced with iPads and tablets. Up and down. I would say that semiconductors are also reaching a point where it won’t offer long term stability. If you’re this young, you should absolutely look elsewhere. I think you don’t hear a lot about semiconductor engineers because the tech changes very fast and it’s mostly the chemists, physicists, and materials scientists who can keep up, aside from the ECE who do more of the abstract work. Recently, Huawei announced a more efficient design which would be yet another win for fabless. Of course TSMC won’t let them come to their facilities and let them make the chip, but it also means they can look for certain foundries. By the way, TSMC runs on Extreme Ultra Violet light to make their chips. Other companies are betting on Direct Ultraviolet light. Although both say the name Ultraviolet, their manufacturing techniques are completely different. They will use different gases, different chemicals, and different etching techniques to do the job. This alone changes what you can and can’t do because you can be the absolute best in one way but bad in another, when the technology pivots, you will need to start over. It’s always best to have a broad set of skills and a deep understanding of the basics. Many investors also believe that quantum computers and photonics will be viable enough as well

4

u/randyest Jun 02 '26

This is either a very good troll or peak stupidity. But I guess I bit so oh wel. I was just floored because I had to readjust my entire scale of just how dumb something can be in order to begin to process this layer-cake of idiocy. I regret it.

0

u/JollyToby0220 Jun 02 '26

You can look up Hardware Engineer on BLS.gov to get a good picture. I would look up the number of jobs and compare it with other fields you think are highly sought after. And the growth. Most hardware jobs are now in Asia since these places have the cutthroat culture. Hardware is not the same as Electrical/Electronics though they share similarities. By the way, a lot of this recent growth is thanks to AI. And most companies are looking at ways to downsize hardware. Every sector, from aviation to military to manufacturing are looking at integrating IoT over hardware. 

2

u/randyest Jun 03 '26

You don't even understand what half the words you're trying to use actually mean. IoT is hardware.

1

u/JollyToby0220 Jun 03 '26

They are a little bit different. IoT are programmable circuits. You get more constrained on what you can use. Hardware engineers make things like hospital devices which perform some function. IoT usually blends some microcontroller alongside programming. Definitely hardware engineers are doing some programming. But they will probably call an embedded systems engineer to have a device control something. IoT is usually what embedded systems engineers learn at first. Hardware engineers will look at manufacturing defects while Embedded systems will look at programming bugs, logic etc. So you might think, hey I can analyze this circuit, this means I should be able to have a full 360 view of everything that is happening and this just isn’t true. Embedded systems have a much easier time finding work than hardware. Some school, especially those near Silicon Valley, used to have hardware engineering majors up until the actual Silicon Valley companies. 

3

u/randyest Jun 04 '26

Programmable circuits? You're still just spitting nonsense. IoT = InternetOfThings =~ mostly lower-power always-on devices but that says nothing about if it's an ASIC, ASSP, FPGA, MCU, COTS CPU, PLD, or a flippin' LM741 op amp. What are you even on about?

This:

"So you might think, hey I can analyze this circuit, this means I should be able to have a full 360 view of everything that is happening and this just isn’t true. Embedded systems have a much easier time finding work than hardware."

... is hereby nominated to be the dumbest thing ever posted to this subreddit . Nope, wait, my bad, I already beat that by making this comment

https://giphy.com/gifs/1014RBn4HVSTK

11

u/WonderfulJelly4284 May 31 '26

Its a good field. You should go for it.

7

u/Every-Contact7020 Jun 01 '26

Its an abundant market(imo), but you should expect to work hard to break through. T10 University (should) cover CS fundamentals in case you wanted to pivot into SWE. I would go for it!

0

u/Fun-Size-4295 Jun 01 '26

Is McGill comp Eng a T10 school?

2

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/Fun-Size-4295 Jun 03 '26

Can I ask what range then

6

u/Direct-Progress758 Jun 01 '26

You kids these days worry way too much. If you're a typical HS grad, I'm guessing you don't even know how semicondcutor works. :- ) Just go kick ass for the next four years and you will be fine.

Sky was falling in 1992, and it fell again in 2000 and 2008. Job market corrects itself over time. In 2022 no one wanted to study EE, but in 2026 many kids bailed on CS and applied to various eng again.

Let's say the unemployment rate for EE rises to a disastrous 10%. If you excel at a T10 EE program, you should ideally be in the other 90%.

Chip design sounds like the golden ticket for EE students, but there are so many other roles at a semi (fabless) company such as software, firmware, design verification, application engineering, FAE, and sales. Also those who couldn't hack it as a design engineer turned into product marketing and tell engineers what to build. :- ) You can also go to TSMC's website and see a list of job openings in AZ to see what roles are available at a fab.

Best of luck.

3

u/ArbitArc Jun 01 '26

The boom is just getting started. It will be another 20 year run with massive demand for chip designers. One thing though — you need to know more and able to use agents to do and to end flows. If you are patient and long term oriented, then yes. Otherwise pick an easier field.

6

u/Adrienne-Fadel May 31 '26

You see CHIPS act headlines and think its a gold rush. Same energy as chasing a stock after CNBC already ran the segment. Jobs lag investment by years.

2

u/ChairGodIsGreat May 31 '26

I see that and because I’ll still have 4 years of college, I think early jobs might be ready by then. But I agree that it can take like 10 years sometimes

5

u/Mostly_Harmless86 Jun 01 '26

Semiconductor field is hard to get into. Its really hard to get your foot in the door of this field as an undergrad. They generally want good grades (3.5+) and some research experience, and those positions are few and far between. You will have better (but not great luck) if you have a Masters and PhDs.

If you really want into this field you need to network like crazy! I have one friend (of many that tried) that managed to get his foot kinda in the door (semiconductor design company but hired in a supporting role) after networking at a lot of conferences. He has a strong gpa, graduated with honors and was able to get a paper published as an undergrad (embedded systems related). It was such a big deal that we threw him a party !

As an EE, my international friends are really struggling due to the political climate over here, to land jobs and internships. Getting US companies to sponsor you right now sucks. However, my US citizen friends are not having as many problems getting at least some type of job in the field.

2

u/FluffyThunder74 Jun 01 '26

When I was in college over 30 years ago, I had a professor say a side effect to Moore’s Law is the number of chips/products/complexity also double, requiring more engineer, so we would have job security. It is hard to say if that ended up playing out as he predicted. I was unemployed after the dot com bust, but overall I have been pretty secure. I think finding and staying at one place no longer occurs. Shifts in the market can cause excellent engineers to be laid off. I think remote work triggered by Covid did have some change in hiring though. I see more competition for our remote positions than if we require on site. I’m also seeing more back fill hiring due to retirements, but that might be due to the maturity of the group.

2

u/cabbit_ Jun 02 '26

EE is not nearly as saturated, and posts about people submitting 200 applications are often people just shotgunning their resume to all sorts of companies via LinkedIn or otherwise. I work at a semiconductor company and submitted a total of one (1) application, to the company I ended up working for.

EE is very broad, and in college you can often pick what specialty or discipline you want to focus on. If you are interested in analog design work, you will definitely need at least a masters degree to even have the chance to talk to someone. RF has a lot of potential for compensation, heavily tied to defense and communications industry which is currently booming.

My advice is to go to university and see what you like. I focused on primarily power electronics, large scale power generation, and semiconductor physics and now I travel for work and do something I never really thought was possible for a semiconductor company. Feel free to PM me with any questions, there’s a lot of doom in this post but if you can keep >3.0 GPA (>3.5 GPA is super ideal to be more competitive) and do projects throughout your undergrad. Get involved in clubs. I promise you, if you are a junior level EE student with a resume full of INTERESTING projects that you actually did (not just scrape a GitHub repo and copy their project), you will get an internship offer and from there you can evaluate if you want to work full time for a company or want to explore other options.

6

u/frogchris May 31 '26

There is no surge in hiring unless you're in India lol.

Working in semiconductors is basically working 9 am to 9 pm 5 days a week and getting paid less than major software companies.

1

u/ChairGodIsGreat May 31 '26

So the pay ain’t it? I mean one of the reasons I went into engineering was money tbh

2

u/XruinsskashowsX Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

You can make more starting in semiconductors than most other industries and the barrier to entry is lower than the others in EE that are going to pay well from day 1 if you aren’t design engineer (a lot of people opining here don’t seem to realize that post silicon validation, applications, marketing, test, and any sort of production/manufacturing work exist)

The real thing you should be asking yourself is where you want to actually live in the future, because semis are a lot more geographically concentrated than an industry like power generation, which doesn’t pay as well but is every where.

0

u/Mostly_Harmless86 Jun 01 '26

"I mean one of the reasons I went into engineering was money tbh"

Yeah don't do it for the money. The material is some of the hardest any undergrad will ever have to slog through to get a degree. And on the flip side, you have to work in the USA or Canada to be paid well. And on top of that the politcal climate here is throwing wrenches into research, academia, defence, and just the economy as a whole. Plus the private sector wants to cut 10,000 jobs on a whim overnight, just because.

0

u/Fearless-Hamster-926 May 31 '26

Ambitious Americans should try becoming doctors, dentists, pilots, or physician assistants. Anything else is on the way out or saturated.

0

u/cololz1 Jun 01 '26

why not work with firmware? like in EV cars

3

u/randyest Jun 02 '26

Because it's like programming, but on a shitty computer, and is boring.

3

u/Jarb0t Jun 02 '26

But what if you like programming shitty computers?

2

u/randyest Jun 03 '26

Then you are in luck! Step right down into this dingy lab my friend! I've got a MPC390808010 advanced microcontroller eval kit ready for your sweet soothing code to roll over its registers and make cute animations on that 16-color 40-dpi screen. Just think of all the fun you can have with a RTC, 16 hardware interrupts, and dozens of GPIO! As a bonus, you get paid! $30/hour and you get to live in Boise and come into the office 5 days a week 8-6pm where you will sit alone in a conference room or cube and connect by teams or zoom to others in different cubes or conference rooms or states or countries.