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Cassidy: Big Silicon Valley demand for analog engineers' 'black art' - San Jose Mercury News 8/21/11 10:51 AM

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Cassidy: Big Silicon Valley demand for analog

engineers' 'black art'

By Mike Cassidy

Mercury News Columnist

Posted: 08/20/2011 03:00:00 PM PDT

Updated: 08/21/2011 08:58:34 AM PDT

You want a good look at Silicon Valley's bipolar job market? Step into the

Click photo to enlarge

11th-floor office of Young Sohn.

The CEO of Santa Clara-based Inphi is tearing his hair out trying to hire the

engineers he needs to design the chips required to make high-speed digital

communication possible. Never mind the plentiful electrical engineers who

create the semiconductors that are the building blocks of our digital gadgets.

Sohn hungers for analog engineers, the geeks who rely on their gut -- and,

yes, design principles -- to build the chips that our digital gadgets need to

capture and replay the real world -- video and sound, for instance.

"We call it a black art," Sohn says, going a little Harry Potter on us. "Those

who practice a black art become very precious."

Hamid Rategh, Ph.D., of Inphi

Corporation, in Santa Clara, is an

So precious that Sohn sounds like one of those dot-com-bubble CEOs as he engineer... ( KAREN T. BORCHERS )

talks about the company's referral bonus, about how he's hired teams of Find:

faraway engineers and let them stay right where they are as long as they'd

South Bay Go

in:

work for him.

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"If there are a few guys who don't want to come, then you have to set up a

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design center around them," Sohn says, citing, for example, an Inphi group Jewish Community Center of Los Gatos: Expires

working in London. "That's how much power they have." 8/24/2011

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And then there was the engineer that Sohn hired even though the guy said he couldn't start for about a year because

8/28/2011

he was bonding with his new baby.

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All of which must seem especially cruel to those among the 10.3 percent of the valley

that is unemployed and might be struggling just to

get an interview. But that is life in the valley in 2011.

Advertisement Many have noted how Facebook, Google (GOOG), Most Viewed Most E-Mailed

Apple (AAPL) and hot startups are fighting over

programmers with just the right skills. The good (From the last 12 hours)

fortune of analog engineers is lesser known, but just

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Belle Wei, dean of San Jose State's college of 2. Strauss-Kahn accuser lawyer questions DA's

engineering, isn't surprised that analog chipmakers motives

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"This has been an ongoing challenge for some time," ISLAYMS

she says. "Analog design is different from digital 4. San Francisco 49ers defense dominates

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automated extensively. It does take a lot of training 5. One man critical after double shooting in

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Analog is not black and white -- or more precisely, it's

not 1s and 0s. The analog world is a world of waves,

unlike the digital world of off or on. In analog design

there often is no one right answer, just one best Recommendations

answer.

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Wei, who says that San Jose State has beefed up its

what your friends are recommending.

analog offerings in recent years, likens the analog career path to an apprenticeship. (Indeed, Sohn says the average

age of his engineers is 43, statistically ancient in the youth-obsessed valley.)

Two men fighting for lives after bloody

Sohn, who competes for talent with bigger concerns like Intel (INTC), Broadcom, Cisco (CSCO), Marvell, Texas 49ers-Raiders game violence - San Jose

Instruments and many others, has grabbed up the talent that he can. Inphi, he says, has doubled in size to about 200 Mercury News

workers in the past two years. 564 people recommend this.

O'Brien: A turbulent end to the PC era -

There have been few better times for students to go into analog, Wei says, putting in a plug for San Jose State's

San Jose Mercury News

analog push, which was funded in part by companies hungry for talent. Analog chips, or chips combining analog and

digital design, are needed to capture images and sound and translate them into digital information for transmission or 7 people recommend this.

storage, for instance. Without analog there would be no digital revolution.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_18711322?source=rss Page 1 of 3

Cassidy: Big Silicon Valley demand for analog engineers' 'black art' - San Jose Mercury News 8/21/11 10:51 AM

storage, for instance. Without analog there would be no digital revolution.

And, maybe you've noticed: Gadgets that process photos, videos and sound are exploding in popularity and becoming Facebook social plugin

ever-more sophisticated, meaning somebody's got to design all those analog chips.

Press Releases Powered by

Hamid Rategh, Inphi's senior director of engineering, can't exactly remember wanting to do anything else. Pick your

analogy: Analog designers are like baseball's crafty left-handers or music's play-it-by-ear pianists or the West's horse

whisperers. Strike Looms as Grocery Workers Reject

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engineers, you throw me at any problem and I'll enjoy solving it." the Scenes at Disney s D23 Expo

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Sounds like a line right out of an analog engineer's job description. The kind that valley companies are busily writing

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and posting on job sites these days.

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Contact Mike Cassidy at ********@***********.*** or 408-***-****. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.

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Bob Thompson Top Commenter

Looked at Inphi's website. OK, I don't have a Master's degree, but I have years and years of

RF engineering experience. My last high tech startup gig had a lot of Master's degree

engineers from USC and Davis. I wound up training them to make proper bench

measurements to improve their design models because they didn't have real world skills.

Master's and Ph'D engineers who couldn't properly calibrate a network analyzer, yet

expected to get meaningful data. And surface mount soldering?.. But they don't teach that

in school. And these guys were eager to learn.

Anyway, I uploaded a resume to the Inphi website. Love to hear from them.

1 Like Reply 11 hours ago

Bob Thompson Top Commenter

WTF! They won't even give me a phone interview. What a crock!

Like Reply 12 hours ago

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