Working his passage

There are times when you seem to have an inherent understanding of something and can’t explain why. That’s how Paul Egan felt about ic layout when he began his career as a graphics design station operator at Hughes Microelectronics. Not that he had the faintest clue about what the job would entail when he applied – at 18 and with a handful of ‘O’ Levels, he was eager to get on the first rung of the technical career ladder and it didn’t really matter what, as long as it involved computers. Egan says: “I really wanted to be a software engineer, but found it impossible to get a foot in the door.” The Hughes job, advertised on a college notice board, sounded promising: “Half the time, the applicant would be doing this thing called ‘ic layout’ and the rest of the time, they would be looking after the cad system.” After ‘enthusing’ his way into the position, he worked with a couple of experienced layout engineers who showed him the basics, layer by layer, and ‘it just clicked.’ Now head of physical design at CSR, he fondly remembers his first boss warning him that ic layout was a dying art – ‘You’ll have between three and five years of doing layout before it’s all automated’. “In some ways, he was right,” Egan continued. “The digital space has become completely automated, but on the analogue side, we are still pretty much doing the same as 20 years ago.”