There is a shortage of technical talents in the analog field and it is difficult to find bipolar design engineers

If you think it's hard to find good engineers, try finding one who understands bipolar design!

In fact, as analog design continues to break through the lower noise limit and the frequency becomes higher and higher, the industry's demand for more professional bipolar circuit design is also increasing. Linear Technology CTO Bob Dobkin pointed out that the lack of bipolar technology expertise among college graduates is becoming a major problem in the industry.

“We lack the engineering skills to push bipolar or BiCMOS,” Dobkin said. “To this day, they are still very good technologies for many applications.”

In a sense, Dobkin's career dates back to the days when bipolar design was still the main circuit making, so it's not surprising that he has such thoughts. Colleges and universities must cultivate professional engineering personnel that the industry urgently needs. And since CMOS appeared 40 years ago, the current school curriculum has shifted to a more and more digital engineering emphasis.

“We didn’t take this seriously in school, and now we’re losing the engineering talent that’s driving bipolar technology,” he said.

Since the density of analog components does not follow Moore's Law and is set by the voltage at which the circuit operates, Dobkin emphasized, "We want to get higher performance and higher voltage output circuits because there are many things that can't operate at 3V," Dobkin said.

But it is not an easy task for schools to produce more engineers with bipolar expertise just to meet the needs of analog companies such as Linear Technology, Maxim, Texas Instruments (TI) and ADI.

“I think of analog design like learning a language. You learn the vocabulary, the grammar. Then you read the books and learn from them. After about 10 years, you become familiar with every part of the analog and know the fundamental differences,” Dobkin said.

For the entire semiconductor industry, it is not just analog companies that face the challenge of talent gap. As the industry gradually transitions from a circuit-level to a system-level design architecture, what has long been lacking is engineering and technical talent with creative thinking.

The average company's engineers will manufacture, sell and support a specific business, but the best engineers assist customers with circuit board design and think about how to integrate all the surrounding components into a higher value design. This is not ordinary engineering talent.

About 60% of Linear Technology's business is done this way. "For the other 40%, when experienced analog engineers say, 'This is a good idea,' we execute it. When the product doesn't exist yet and no one has thought of it, as long as we think the idea is good, we are brave enough to try and innovate, even if there are risks," Dobkin said. "But if there is no inheritance of experienced analog engineers, you won't have such a learning opportunity - to discuss with customers, understand their problems, and then understand how the system works."

Therefore, despite the frequent negative news such as corporate layoffs, unpaid leave and rising unemployment rates, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find excellent engineering and technical talents in simulation and certain professional and technical fields. In addition, experienced senior engineers are retiring one after another, thus facing a serious talent gap crisis. Of course, if the industry makes a large investment in engineering and technical talents, such as raising wages, such a problem may not occur.

In addition to analog design, what other engineering fields are facing serious talent loss or talent gap crisis? What impact will it have on engineering technology? How do you think these problems should be solved in the future? Please share your views.