Complex IC design is increasingly important as our dependence on technology infrastructure becomes more and more essential and the need for faster, smaller, less energy-consuming devices grow. Design specialist Sondrel is clearly reaping the benefits of this trend as it announced a drive to recruit over 100 new engineers for its offices in the UK, China, India, France, Morocco, and North America.
To meet a surge in business, the company is looking for various roles across the IC design supply chain, including ASIC architects, physical designers, design for test engineers, functional safety engineers, hardware designers, verification engineers and project managers.
Sondrel said lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic had not been an issue as the company had already set up long ago to be working from home and enabling team meetings over video. In fact, last November the company said it taped out its largest ever chip on a 16nm node, and more recently said it is working with Samsung and TSMC on 5nm designs.
Graham Curren, Sondrel’s CEO and founder, said, “We are one of the few design companies working on Samsung and TSMC at these advanced nodes. Firstly, because they are invariably extremely large and complex with billions of gates in a design, which requires a large team of extremely experienced design engineers. For example, we recently finished a design on 16nm that required over a hundred people working on it full time for over a year; a resource deployment that would typically only be available within a big blue-chip company. Secondly, we have expertise from several designs at 7nm that gives us a head start on the learning curve of understanding the requirements of 5nm.”