What's your job?

Many times, people ask me, what's your job? I answer, I'm an electronics engineer. When they probe further, I say I'm a Design Verification Engineer in a Japanese semiconductor company.

The moment I end my sentence is the same moment they realize that they shouldn't have asked. They will look astonished, none any less than bewildered.

I will start explaining it here in detail; Unlike in real conversations, I keep it a short description to engage them. If they are interested enough, they will ask questions and I will feed smaller information yet just as crucial for their understanding.

Primarily, my work is to test chips (Integrated Circuits, ICs). These chips could either be on its development stage, improved versions of previous developments, or final packages which would be sold to the clients/market. We test chips with different technologies: motor drivers, LED/LCD drivers, reset ICs, power management ICs, linear/switching regulators, among others.

There are several ways to test a chip, and we do it manually. When I say manually, we have a test board with the chip mounted on it, and we connect supply voltages or currents through wires from the equipment. We have a laboratory where there are loads of different kinds of instruments, and a thermostreamer which could emit air from -80°C up to 220°C. Another way of testing is with the use of machinery. This ain't our job.

Since we do things manually, it is expected that as engineers, we will be able to measure the expected results from different parameters. These parameters could be as simple as output voltage or as bizzare as output noise. We need to know which instrument will be used for which. We also need to perform a simple debug if the indications from our Japanese clients will not give any result.

Indications are the procedures for obtaining the correct and expected result for a parameter. A wrong indication is the main antihero of our job (aside from faulty chip design). Since we work with strict deadlines per chip, we can't afford to have some unproductive time. To rectify this, we need to communicate with the client and ask for changes to the indication. Waiting is the next step, we need to wait until they have sent these indications by ftp so we could proceed with our measurements.

That, among other problems, makes our job easy. In theory, if you just follow the indications, then it is good to go. Makes us quite look like operators, don't we? But it is more than that. 99% of the time, just following the indications won't give you the expected results. You need to employ the technicques in measurement from the college days. What a throwback.

So that's it. That is what we mostly do, not to mention other things like circuit simulation, report making, et cetera et cetera.

Sometimes, it feels good to know that rhe product you are testing is going to be inside one of those smartphones, cars or laptops. But a greater portion of my job stresses me now than it enlightens me. There are just reasons reasons reasons, I digress.

So the next time someone asks me that question again, I hope I could easily give a workable answer. Let this blog be.