Istvan
This is a great topic for discussion. I actually agree with your
conclusion that SI is seen as a commodity. We run into this as SI
consultants all the time. Obviously you did not have the right people
quote on your project. I know of an excellent team here in the US. Now
what is their name? I hear they are nice folk, know "stuff", but can be a
bit expensive (for good reason).
There are many excellent software packages on the market that can solve
most of the problems that one would encounter. They are all terribly
expensive. Unfortunately, they do not teach a person to "fish", so to
speak, in the EM/SI world. My team happens to use Ansys tools, along with
an occasional foray into Simbeor, and Hyperlynx. Each tool is chosen for
it's specific strengths. But even those tools do not do enough for us. We
had to write our own massive s-parameter processing algorithms, so that we
can data mine large design spaces and "real boards". Why? Because we know
"stuff" and know that we often need to work with very large problems that
cannot be natively handled by the other tools, such as the aggregate impact
of package crosstalk across all signals in a quadrant, which can be 100's
of signals.
Anyway, you are right. It is not possible for someone 3 years out of
college to have the full breath of system knowledge that makes for good SI
engineering. And if all they ever do is to run a specific tool for years,
all they will be is a master tool user. Back in the day we designed
massive systems with just slide rules and calculators. The skills that
allowed us to do that are still needed today.
regards,
Scott
Scott McMorrow
Consultant - R&D
Teraspeed Consulting - A Division of Samtec
16 Stormy Brook Rd
Falmouth, ME 04105
(401) 284-1827 Business
http://www.teraspeed.com
On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 2:25 AM, Istvan Nagy <buenoshun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
Did signal integrity engineering become a commodity?
Or is this trend about to slap someone in the face?
I thought it used to be a professor or scientist job for the best and
brightest, but nowadays all companies keep hiring people for their SI teams
in large quantities. Most job postings are like "fresh graduate with 3yr
experience", that's all that's required. The "expert" is not part of the
equation anymore?
Did it become that simple that any fresh graduate can do what 10 years ago
only the smartest people could do?
I got quotes from some service/contractor companies doing SI simulations
for
us on their Ansoft tools (for a lot of money), but "what to simulate" or
"how to interpret the results" was either not covered or was seriously
misguided.
The same might have happened to "engineering" some years earlier. Is it the
same, or this time it is different?
Some threads here on si-list in recent years seem (to me) to reflect that
too.
Regards,
Istvan Nagy
(I am not really an SI-engineer, but a HW/product/board designer)
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