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Computing Reserach and Development
By William Cracraft
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The results of computing research and development run the gamut from speeding up a personal computer and pioneering new consumer products to making better tools for those who design the silicon chips computers depend on.
Hewlett-Packard, one of the biggest names in computer products, has a whole R&D facility working on new products, one of which is a ready-for-release hand-held scanner called Capshare 910 which can "read" a document and save up to 40 pages of information for downloading to a PC.
It can be used anywhere, standing in a bus, at the office or in a coffee shop, said Sharon Connor, world-wide human resources manager for HP Laboratories in Palo Alto. As expected, R & D work at HP is very technical and of the 1000 or so employees in the R&D labs, "90 percent of our folks have either masters or Ph.D.," Connor said.
"A significant number we hire directly out of Ph.D. programs," including those from computer science and electrical engineering programs, "usually with a particular expertise in an area of interest to us like computer architecture, compiler technology, telecommunications, security or the Internet." HP seeks a mix of new hires for their R & D operation.
For experienced workers, they hire from competitors like Sun Micro Systems, Apple Computers and Silicon Graphics. "Another significant portion of hiring is to get fresh new folks in who haven’t been in industry, who have just been in academia, people coming out (of universities) with new Ph.D.s and masters," she said.
HP, with over 100,000 employees world wide, has some strong points in its favor when recruiting. Attracting top talent requires top treatment. "We have our culture (which is) very strong in terms of respect for individuals and empowerment of employees," Connor said. "We really do give people a lot of flexibility. We encourage creative ways of working," she added.
For researchers, HP has many attractions including an "abundance of resources to do research with, a strong intellectual community and a lot of freedom in terms of the research environment," Connor said. The other 10 percent of the R & D staff takes care of human resources, communications and purchasing as well as staffing a modeling shop which makes prototypes of designs. Far from the world of consumer products is Cadence Design of San Jose.
Cadence has about 1300 R & D workers worldwide, the bulk of whom are in San Jose. Cadence develops, "software tools and services that help electronic designers design products and devices," said Gary Albright Cadence director of human resources for R & D. One of the challenges faced by Cadence R & D workers is to make chips more complex without increasing their size.
"Today, many chips are being produced at geometries of .35 microns or lower. That represents the width of the electronic circuit on the surface of the chip itself," Albright said.
"So, if today’s standard is .35 and many companies are migrating to .25, the next generation of design will be at .18...eventually you begin to run into the restrictions of the laws of physics," she added.
Essentially the metal on the chip will get so thin molecules cannot pass along it, posing a new challenge. Cadence R & D engineers are hard at work to overcome that barrier and at the same time working on consolidating the multiple softwares now used to design chips into a single package.
"There is a trend in the industry towards systems-on-a-chip," Albright said. Chip designers who have had to use a number of discrete chips to design their products can now use the Cadence product all on one chip, Albright added. Naturally, this research requires the highest level of computing engineers.
"We have a variety of recruiting methods we use on an ongoing basis for professional or experienced engineers, from a website which posts our current openings to on going attendance at job fairs and various other targeted forms of recruiting," Albright said.
"We go to undergrads as well," said Thaddeus Salter, manager of Cadence’s university recruiting program. Salter uses cooperative education and internship opportunities to bring prospective employees to the company, "which helps them to define and develop their skills so when they graduate we get an employee who, when you total it up, has some years of experience."
Cadence draws employees from include Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Salter said. Cadence products help companies who design everything from cellular phones to heavy machinery.
"We used to have conversations around whether a company was high tech or low tech but in today’s world there are no more low tech companies, there are either companies that are successful at implementing technology or failures at implementing technology," said Albright.
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