Here’s how to get into the semiconductor industry without an engineering degree!

[horace]

Simple, just become an accountant or a lawyer. All semiconductor companines need to hire accountants and lawyers.

Actually, there are tons of non-tech roles in semiconductor companies.

 

[Barnsley]

I wish it was only HR. But in my unfortunate experience I have seen a lot of BS engineers get treated as lesser second class engineers by their PhD counterparts. Sometimes the disrespect is blatant. Those people are often also jerks to the engineers with MSs. Fortunately I never had to work with someone like that, but I did see it far more than I would have liked. More often, the disrespect is FAR more subtle. I'm unsure if the negative behavior was a conscious or unconscious thing. But either way, it often only became truly apparent after working with said individual(s) for a while. It also feels like you need to accomplish far more to progress your career at the same pace. Such a dumb philosophy when some of the most accomplished engineers at Micron, Intel, and TSMC only have BS degrees... I give folks like TI that don't give a care in the world for what your degree says a lot of credit. A while ago they ran a study of their best engineers and highest level managers and to what should have been nobody's surprise found that there was no correlation with educational background. As a result, they stopped with the PhD obsessiveness. Every other manufacturing industry has known this information for centuries at this point, but for all the logic chips made by the semiconductor industry, this industry-wide phenomon is remarkably devoid of it.

Not as few R&D positions as you think if you know what to look for and where. And also many "R&D positions" aren't purely that either. After all, your fancy Xtor is worthless if it can't be made at a low enough per unit cost. But I am mostly talking about even for manufacturing engineer jobs. Heck, I know one tool vendor that would even hire on field service engineers (aka a technician with a fancy title) who had PhDs.

I don't really get what you mean. People who want to be techs generally want to be techs and don't have any aspirations of becoming engineers (at least in my experience).

Maybe I am talking something else.

I am taking "Semiconductor Industry" as working in the Semicon Industry , not the top few % doing the "good stuff"

Singapore FABS are full of folk without degree , just years of on the job training to do a job. The folk getting bussed in from Malaysia daily for example and those from China are here to do a job , nothing fancy.

I think I am the only person at our office who have technical degree , but most of our office function is sales and support , however we have folk with over 25 yrs experience in photomask.

 

[Barnsley]

Simple, just become an accountant or a lawyer. All semiconductor companines need to hire accountants and lawyers.

Actually, there are tons of non-tech roles in semiconductor companies.

Yes there is more to the Industry than RnD in Design at the frontend and manufacture/process on the backend

 

[nghanayem]

Yes there is more to the Industry than RnD in Design at the frontend and manufacture/process on the backend

I mean being an accountant, janitor, HR person, or cafeteria staff isn't really "working for the semiconductor industry" in my opinion. It is literally not any different to doing those jobs at a large bank, a hospital, a steel company, or a marketing firm. Being a technician, one of the various in the fab/subfab contractors, engineer (and not just R&D since most jobs are manufacturing), scientist, lab techs, microscopist (or whatever the term for that would be), or someone who works building fabs or packaging facilities at either an equipment supplier or semiconductor manufacturer is "working in the semiconductor industry" in a way that would feel even remotely different from working the same role at literally any other company. But to each his own I guess. At least that account at NVIDIA was getting the same pre AI boom shares that his firmware programmer was getting. Although that Intel accountant was just as equally getting Intel shares...

 

[osnium]

I wish it was only HR. But in my unfortunate experience I have seen a lot of BS engineers get treated as lesser second class engineers by their PhD counterparts. Sometimes the disrespect is blatant. Those people are often also jerks to the engineers with MSs. Fortunately I never had to work with someone like that, but I did see it far more than I would have liked. More often, the disrespect is FAR more subtle. I'm unsure if the negative behavior was a conscious or unconscious thing. But either way, it often only became truly apparent after working with said individual(s) for a while. It also feels like you need to accomplish far more to progress your career at the same pace. Such a dumb philosophy when some of the most accomplished engineers at Micron, Intel, and TSMC only have BS degrees... I give folks like TI that don't give a care in the world for what your degree says a lot of credit. A while ago they ran a study of their best engineers and highest level managers and to what should have been nobody's surprise found that there was no correlation with educational background. As a result, they stopped with the PhD obsessiveness. Every other manufacturing industry has known this information for centuries at this point, but for all the logic chips made by the semiconductor industry, this industry-wide phenomon is remarkably devoid of it.

Not as few R&D positions as you think if you know what to look for and where. And also many "R&D positions" aren't purely that either. After all, your fancy Xtor is worthless if it can't be made at a low enough per unit cost. But I am mostly talking about even for manufacturing engineer jobs. Heck, I know one tool vendor that would even hire on field service engineers (aka a technician with a fancy title) who had PhDs.

I don't really get what you mean. People who want to be techs generally want to be techs and don't have any aspirations of becoming engineers (at least in my experience).

As President Trump slashes research funding and threatens to deport international students, I suspect that the pool of PhD graduates that the semiconductor industry can hire from will drop and they will either move all roles that can be done outside the US out and/or they will be forced to hire talented folks without doctorates.

 

[Barnsley]

I mean being an accountant, janitor, HR person, or cafeteria staff isn't really "working for the semiconductor industry" in my opinion. It is literally not any different to doing those jobs at a large bank, a hospital, a steel company, or a marketing firm. Being a technician, one of the various in the fab/subfab contractors, engineer (and not just R&D since most jobs are manufacturing), scientist, lab techs, microscopic (or whatever the term for that would be), or someone who works building fabs or packaging facilities at either an equipment supplier or semiconductor manufacturer is "working in the semiconductor industry" in a way that would feel even remotely different from working literally any other person working the same role at any other company. But to each his own I guess. At least that account at NVIDIA was getting the same pre AI boom shares that his firmware programmer was getting. Although that Intel accountant was just as equally getting Intel shares...

The vast majority of people "in the industry" do not have PHD I would hazard a guess.

Where are the workers coming from to turn the PHD folks ideas into a reality?

 

[nghanayem]

The vast majority of people "in the industry" do not have PHD I would hazard a guess.

If you are talking all engineers, and in the US. Then yeah most of them do (outside of TI anyhow). Go to GF, Intel, Infineon, LAM, AMAT, OnSemi, Microchip, Tower, ASM, etc. and you will see it. Technician side (inclusive of field service engineers and customer support engineers because despite the title that is basically what they do), mostly not PhDs. But the number is more than 0 (maybe around 5-10%) which shouldn't be the case. And a large number have BS degrees which is also absurd and completely unnecessary.

Where are the workers coming from to turn the PHD folks ideas into a reality?

That's the thing. I have seen PhD technicians, I have seen PhD vendor support engineers, the majority of production and process engineers have PhDs. PhD is supposed to be for research but the semiconductor industry hires PhD for everything. It is a waste of their skills to have them doing the work that people with lower levels of education can do, and it also screws over the people with lower education who just want to do their jobs through a reasonable career path. When I mentioned jobs where it was PhD+0 years or BS+10 years, that is for entry level production engineers at HVM fabs or for vendor customer support engineers. If you want to talk about R&D. Most R&D departments would almost never even consider a BS person even with more than a decade experience as a regular HVM process engineer. Someone with a 2 year degree, yous can fuhgeddaboudit! They'd be lucky to ever get a job holding the pager at 95% of semi manufacturers. Not even leading edge semiconductor exclusive phenomon either, you see the same thing at 8" analog fabs too.

 

[Paul2]

If you are talking all engineers, and in the US. Then yeah most of them do (outside of TI anyhow). Go to GF, Intel, Infineon, LAM, AMAT, OnSemi, Microchip, Tower, ASM, etc. and you will see it. Technician side, mostly not PhDs. But the number is more than 0 (maybe around 5-10%) which shouldn't be the case. And a large number have BS degrees which is also absurd and completely unnecessary.

That's the thing. I have seen PhD technicians, I have seen PhD vendor support engineers, the majority of production engineers have PhDs. PhD is supposed to be for research but the semiconductor industry hires PhD for everything. It is a waste of their skills to have them doing the work that people with low levels of education can do, and it also screws over the people with lower education who just want to do their jobs through a reasonable career path. When I mentioned jobs where it was PhD+0 years or BS+10 years, that is for entry level production engineers for vendor customer support engineer and even at HVM only fabs. If you want to talk about R&D. Most R&D departments would almost never even consider a BS person even with more than a decade experience as a regular HVM process engineer. Someone with a 2 year degree, yous can fuhgeddaboudit! They'd be lucky to ever get a job holding the pager at 95% of semi manufacturers. Not even leading edge semiconductor exclusive phenomon either, you see the same thing at 8" analog fabs too.

On the design side, many of the people who write verilog for Apple SoCs in Bangladesh may not even have an institution diploma, but a private academy certificate + high school, and some prior technical education, probably on 2 year diploma level in a not really related technical field.

 

[benb]

The thing that I like about semi is the mix of backgrounds. Most fabs are like the United Nations; you can literally work shoulder to shoulder with someone from Uzbekistan, or Moldova, or Malaysia, or you name it. Philippines. China and India, obviously.

Education varies by the function though. Process Integration is mostly, perhaps entirely, PHDs. In huge departments, like Photo or Etch, the mainline of process owners are PHDs, but there are support functions with BS. In smaller departments, and in ancillary functions of big departments, you have many, perhaps mostly, BS. In 2021 when labor demand exceeded supply, my fab began a program for technicians with AS degrees to advance to process ownership, and this program still exists. The better path in my opinion is to use the educational benefits and get a BS degree. You have to pay back the money if you take the degree and leave though.

Community colleges in big fab-operating metros, like Maricopa County and Travis County have AS training programs which are just fabulous for entry level technicians. Even some high schools have pretty incredible programs. Paul2 has mentioned one of the problems though--pay is not as high, so these non-college track, but really well-prepared people, they tend to be in high demand many places, and semi jobs aren't as appealing, because so much of it is drone work.

 

[nghanayem]

The thing that I like about semi is the mix of backgrounds. Most fabs are like the United Nations; you can literally work shoulder to shoulder with someone from Uzbekistan, or Moldova, or Malaysia, or you name it. Philippines. China and India, obviously.

This is something I really do like. I've never worked in Singapore but it seems like it is also this way (albeit probably not to the same extent as the US).

Education varies by the function though. Process Integration is mostly, perhaps entirely, PHDs. In huge departments, like Photo or Etch, the mainline of process owners are PHDs, but there are support functions with BS. In smaller departments, and in ancillary functions of big departments, you have many, perhaps mostly, BS.

To some extent yes. Like yeah never seen a BS integration engineer and I have seen and with rare exception every BS person I have ever seen was a sustaining grunt. But at least in my experience there thin films/metals/planar/metro all seemed similar in educational make up to the etch department (very few BS people a decent bit of MS and a plurality of PhDs).

In 2021 when labor demand exceeded supply, my fab began a program for technicians with AS degrees to advance to process ownership, and this program still exists.

At my first company there was a long standing policy of never hiring any engineer without a PhD and then when that same labor shortage happened they first began allowing MS engineers for basic production engineers and BS engineers for night shift engineers. Then later it relaxed to a more industry standard (at least based on the job postings you see about and all of the backgrounds of the various teams I interviewed at back in the past) BS and MS can do everything that isn't integration or R&D as long as you put in 5x or 10x the time to get there and seeing a smattering of PhD/MS/BS entry level grunt engineers. But of course your mileage may have varied.

Community colleges in big fab-operating metros, like Maricopa County and Travis County have AS training programs which are just fabulous for entry level technicians. Even some high schools have pretty incredible programs. Paul2 has mentioned one of the problems though--pay is not as high, so these non-college track, but really well-prepared people, they tend to be in high demand many places, and semi jobs aren't as appealing, because so much of it is drone work.

This is great advice. For anyone looking for a technician job who doesn't have prior mechanical experience or a military background in the US. Be it Oregon, Idaho, NM, Arizona, Texas, and presumably even NY there are tons of great programs to get you a leg up. But it does kind of fly in the face of the original idea of getting in with no degree. As for the pay, I don't think technician pay with some kind of degree or decent experience is too bad. They made around what I made as an entry level engineer, and some techs made far far more than me if they wanted to put in extra days and or had a lot of experience). But yeah no degree 0 year experience technicians make very little money. Better than like Walmart money, but also well below US average pay.