If you have worked in production for 1 to 2 years, it's rather hard (I wouldn't say it's impossible). People will not likely to hire you with experienced level pay with different kind of experience. It's hard to get an interview let alone an offer if your resume documents your experience in production/process but you are applying more technical driven job functions, like R&D.

Just to tell you the truth, with a bachelor's degree and 0 experience, even if you secure a job in R&D, it will be not really that kind R&D you were dreaming about. You will be mostly do a lot of test and measurements, troubleshooting and the most is fine-tuning or optimization based on an existing reference design and back-end development activities supporting the real design engineers overseas. Based on what I have seen so far, in semiconductor industry, designing from scratch or prototype definition are mostly done by people with more than 8 to 10 years experience or with PhD degree.


YES.

This post has been edited by TYK: Jul 29 2006, 02:24 AM

Process people usually deals with mass production processes and thus most of the time you will find yourself working with operator/human related issues. The technical knowledge involved in process may or may not related to R&D, depends on the company's business nature.

Test engineer are people who take care of the testers, and testing operations in production line. They are aslo skilled with test script/test programming debugging. It's very hard to say whether it will lead you to R&D, as it will depends on your work experience and skills, as an individual.

Again, it depends on the company, most of them have a very generic name, just R&D engineer.

In semiconductor/chip maker business, job titles CONSIDERED R&D are like circuit design, IC layout, development or something like that.

This post has been edited by TYK: Jul 30 2006, 12:49 AM

In semiconductor business, more than one type of tester platforms are being used, and it depends also on which stage in the manufacturing pipepline. I am not from test background, so it's hard for me to say what kind of job prospect you have if you possess 3070's knowledge.

Employer usually will hire people with directly related experience if they are not fresh graduate. Say, a company is hiring RF system design engineer in radio front-end circuit design, certainly they won't hire people with experience in mass production's tester operation or quality control engineering.