Hi everyone, I am an intern and have 2 offers at different companies. One role being design verification and other one RTL design. I mostly like programming and want to be in hardware space. My current role as an intern was some what design + verification role but I liked verification more. I think I would be very good verification engineer. I am very career ambitious and want to raise through the rank. I am kind of confused on future path. Please advise!
DV is better for progression. Make sure you join a growing DV team and not an already established one. Design is kinda Saturated.
Growing team.. how to know if it's growing or not? I feel that's something you know after joining the team
Verification has more opportunities than design. It's easier to find/change jobs in verification. Personally, I would suggest joining a startup or a IP verif team, rather than SoC verification ( you learn a lot more at IP level).
I have one offer from small firm and liked the transparency in team
My suggestion for joining an IP or a small team, is that you get to learn a lot! Verification is a big domain; the more things you learn and work on newer things, the better marketable your skills are! With SOC verif teams, you spend a lot of times just re-using IP val framework and waiting on runs to finish!
rtl is hard and risky. ECO sucks. But when you see the actual chips you've designed, it blows off everything you suffered. I had a chance to be DV but not chose and not regret. But someone , probably many, chooses DV.
DV has many more opportunities. RTL Design is about 10-30% RTL design. Then a whole bunch of crap like synth, layout, prototyping, lab debug, and worst of all customer debugging. DV is closer to software. And if you like software you should go software because for the near and medium term it pays 2-3x or more with better job security and WLB.
Pay is something that I am not worried as long as I enjoy doing what I do but you have good point. I like hardware specifically dealing with signals(DSP) and it's operation. My DV job seems like a perfect fit given my interests.
I moved from design to DV. One thing I can say if you want to be DV engineer is that join IP instead of SS or higher. That way you get to build your programming skills and protocol knowledge as well. Also, if you are good at OOP and your mind is already set to OOP, I say DV can be a good fit.
How are you finding difference? Why did you move?
Mainly, I was more interested in system verilog programming and scripting. When I was in design as a junior, I wasn't doing much programming other than writing simple verilog blocks and scripting for automation. Other than that, running bunch of tools for synthesis, LEC, CDC, STA etc. was not very interesting for me. DM me if you have more questions. :)
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