To the present...

As I mentioned at the start of this blog, I am currently living in Germany. You might be wondering (after reading my life story so far…) how this actually came to be. Well, I’ll tell you. I’m going to attempt to complete my life story up to the present in this one posting. It may be a rather long posting, but I am determined to do it.

So I grew up in Detroit (well, mostly Allen Park … but I lived in the Detroit metropolitan area for the first 24 or so years of my life…), spent a year down in Boca Raton then made the move to Longmont. The situation with Sandy has already been told, I will now continue the story from that point…

As I had mentioned, Sandy was of the impression that I would have no problem finding work in Colorado. She was right. It was only about two weeks after moving to Colorado that I was able to get a job at this small “mom and pop” ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) design house named SIS Microelectronics (the SIS didn’t stand for anything…). How I was able to actually land this job, I really couldn’t say. I had been working for EDS after graduation and had absolutely no experience in ASIC design. I must have said the correct things in the interview, however, as the nice people at SIS Microelectronics were actually willing to give me a try. Sweet, I finally got a job in hardware engineering … this was what I spent all those years in school for.

The best part about it was that SIS was located in Longmont. I mean the idea of living in Longmont was so that I could look for work in Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins; however I was able to land a job in Longmont! Sweet! At least my professional life was starting to look a bit brighter. I was sharing an apartment with Sandy (well, kind of…) and had even solved my unemployment problem. Not to mention the fact that I was now living in Colorado – and I always liked Colorado. I had only been there once before on a ski trip with the WSU Ski Club (I was actually the vice president of the ski club – Rachel was the president – and we arranged a trip to Steamboat Springs during one of my senior years in college) but I immediately fell in love with the state during this trip. Yeah, my life was finally starting to come together…

My social life was still a bit of a mess, but that’s always been an area that I haven’t really had much success in. I’m just not known as being a very sociable person – never have been and probably never will. That’s okay though … I seem to be able to somehow find myself a small group of friends pretty much wherever I end up and I always have my old friends back in Michigan to fall back on when the shit really hits the fan. Interesting (well to me, at least) side note here: I have recently been informed by Jon that I am a “character”. This was brought on while at work over here in Germany. You see there’s this technical expert that is currently visiting the Braunschweig site from the states. As he was due to arrive, meetings were being setup so that the team here could get the most use out of him during his visit. A couple days ago he walked into the office where Jon and I sit to ask if we had any issues we wanted to discuss. While he was there, he asked me if we had met before. Now get this – we had. Turns out that he actually took a training course about four or five years ago and I was the instructor. Now I’m not good at remembering names (or even people, in general) and there were something like 15 people in that class so I really couldn’t say that I remembered him; but he remembered me. Perhaps I am a bit of a character…

So where was I? Oh yeah, SIS… So I worked at SIS for about four years. It was a good job and gave me the opportunity to learn quite a bit about the entire ASIC design process. You see, SIS was a very small custom ASIC Design shop. Most of the well known ASIC Design shops were actually rather large. In fact ASIC work is usually done by groups within much larger companies. Companies such as LSI Semiconductor, Motorola, Texas Instruments – you know … the big guys. SIS had something like a dozen or so employees at its zenith. We were a small shop… What this meant was that we really didn’t have the unitization of the design process that you can get when you have thousands of employees. Yeah, certain engineers in our small company had more expertise in various aspects of the process, but in order to get the ICs done we all needed to pretty much do work in all areas of the design. There’s a saying about engineers that goes something like “you learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing.” Working in such a small company actually gave me the opportunity to at least get a feel for the various tasks that were required to complete a successful ASIC design. It gave me a way of better understanding the entire process rather than just focusing all my efforts on one aspect.

The only real problem with being such a small design shop was that we weren’t able to sell ourselves as well as the big guys. We were basically forced to take on projects from customers that were either to poor to afford the larger company’s fees or had been turned down by the larger companies due to small productions or just plain bad designs. This situation couldn’t last forever and four years into working there, SIS was sold off to Aspec Technologies – a company in the Silicon Valley that was in the process of going public and was trying to further expand its capabilities in order to drive up the price of its IPO. The move worked as the stock price for Aspec opened trading at the highest price it would ever see. It stayed there for a period of less than a day and then began its decline. Aspec Technologies is now out of business…

How this relates to my life was that, after being sold to Aspec, the workload completely dried up. We were able to stay in Longmont as opposed to moving operations out to the Silicon Valley which was good. I don’t think we got a single new project to work on which was bad. I remember about a three month period where I would basically go into work every day and just surf the web for eight hours then go home. There was nothing for me to work on. This was when I realized that I had to get going – and I had to do it quickly! ASIC design is not an industry where you want to spend too much time sitting on your ass doing nothing. The technology is constantly changing and moving forward (smaller and smaller technologies as well as toolsets that are in a constant state of change) and if you get pigeon holed into outdated skills you’re screwed! Luckily, I had at least one contact that was working as an AE (Applications Engineer) with Avant! – an EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool vendor that was just starting to get a presence in the ASIC industry. I inquired on whether they were looking to hire and actually was able to get a job as an AE for Avant! myself…

Working as an AE was quite different that working as a design engineer. Rather than being responsible for actual design work for customers I was now tasked with helping other design engineers with the use of Avant!’s toolset. I was also – rather quickly it seems – given the task of instructing classes for our customers on the use of the toolset. This was rather interesting as I instructed classes at Avant!’s Fremont, California main campus as well as several on-site classes at various customer’s campuses. The office that I was working from, however, was located in Boulder, Colorado. What this meant was that I spent – with technical support and training – a lot of time on the road (well, at airports and hotels, actually). I only worked for Avant! for a year and a half and took something like 17 business trips in that period. It got to where I seemed to be waking up in various hotel rooms far more often that I was waking up in my own bed. I would write some more about this, but I need to get on with my story or this thing will never end – maybe I’ll write more about this later…

Doing the whole “living my life out of a suitcase” thing got old pretty quickly (as I said, I worked for Avant! for only a year and a half…) and life, as it would seem, sometimes has some rather unexpected surprises hidden in it. I was still living in Colorado. I wasn’t in the same apartment that I moved to after moving out of the apartment with Sandy though. As a matter of fact, I had since moved to this old condo (rented…) over on the northeast side of Longmont (an area referred to by some as “Taco Flats”), rented a house in Boulder when I got the job at Avant! and moved to an apartment in Broomfield when Avant! moved it’s northern Colorado office from Boulder to Broomfield. I was currently living in the Broomfield apartment. The thing is that I had kept in touch with some of the guys that I used to work with at SIS Microelectronics (I refuse to call it Aspec Technologies as that situation didn’t go to well…) and was asked to help one of them, Jim move from a condo he had bought (and just sold) to this new duplex that he recently purchased. Sure, as I said before, I’m always willing to help a brother out…

The thing is that Aspec had gone belly-up while I was working at Avant!. The former SIS team was sold to a company by the name of Orbit in the asset liquidation. Orbit was currently in the process of getting bought by Flextronics International and was going to become a new subsidiary by the name of Flextronics Semiconductor. The remaining people from what once was SIS Microelectronics were now in the process of becoming Flextronics Semiconductor. I headed up to Loveland to help Jim move. Ray – my former boss at SIS – was also there to help. During one of the trips between the old condo and the new duplex, Ray asked me if I was interested in coming back to work with the team. I basically told him that I was interested (remember, the constant business traveling was starting to become a pain) but that I didn’t know when I would be able to do it. I think it was about a month later when I resigned from Avant!...

I headed over to this strip club, Cheerleaders with Matt – a guy that worked shortly at Avant! before getting laid off for no good reason – after my last day of work there. It was here that I received a phone call from Ray saying that I could start work at Flextronics Semiconductor as soon as I wanted. A few weeks later I was working at Flextronics. It was kinda like moving forward in reverse as I pretty much felt like I was back at SIS Microelectronics again. Sure, there were some new faces, but the feel was definitely the same as when I worked at SIS. I was back doing actual ASIC design work and didn’t need to worry about the non-stop business travel anymore … or so I thought…

Funny thing is that Ray called me into his office that following fall and asked if I would be interested in heading down to Dallas to work with Texas Instruments on one of the ASICs that we were currently doing. He told me that it would just be for a couple of weeks and I agreed to do it. I headed down to Dallas and returned back to Colorado two weeks later. I then headed back to Dallas (the project wasn’t completed…) and returned back to Colorado two weeks later. I actually ended up doing this for seven months straight – I would spend two weeks in Dallas, one weekend back in Colorado and then head back to Dallas on the next Monday. So much for avoiding business trips…

I really didn’t mind it too much. The biggest problem was that I had just recently bought a house in Longmont. It was a bit strange having finally purchased a house and pretty much living in Dallas while the house remained vacant… Oh well, it could have been worse – during the four years that I worked at Flextronics, this was the only business trip that I went on. After the Dallas trip I was able to stay in Colorado and live in my newly purchased house.

It was actually about a year ago when Flextronics International decided that they were going to sell the semiconductor portion of their business and Flextronics Semiconductor was sold to AMI Semiconductor. This would finally be the end of the crew that was remaining from the old SIS Microelectronics group. The options that we had were to try to obtain work with AMI (which would mean moving to either Pocatello, ID – their main campus – or Dallas, TX) or look for work elsewhere. Since AMI is primarily a mixed-signal and analog circuitry house (and since I really wasn’t interested in moving to either location) I decided that it was time to start looking for work elsewhere. I stayed on as part of the transition team and once again became unemployed in March of this year.

Unfortunately, the semiconductor industry has seen much better days than it is currently seeing. Companies are doing all they can to cut costs and try to stay alive. What this means is that (at least in the Colorado area) most of the companies are now laying off many more engineers than they are hiring. I was trying my best to find a job but was having no luck whatsoever. I actually began playing quite a bit of poker and was even looking into what it would take for me to make a living as a professional poker player. Unfortunately, I figured out what it would take and the answer was a combination of a lot of luck and a much larger bankroll than I had access to. I was unsuccessfully looking for work and rather quickly depleting what little money I had remaining. Creditors don’t really care if you have a job; you’re still required to make your payments. I needed to find some source of income.

I really didn’t want to move – I kinda like my little house in Colorado – but was having no luck in finding local work. The only leads I seemed to be getting were always for either contract work at another location or the possibility of moving out to California or Texas. What to do … what to do…?

This one job kept coming up again and again. I don’t know how many emails I received about it and I had even received a couple calls from some recruiters on it. The problem was that it was a job in Germany. I mean, Germany? How crazy would that be if I were to actually take a contract job in Germany? It was also for a very large company that is well known in the semiconductor industry. I caN’T rEalLy tell you the name of this company as I have signed an NDA agreement with them, but they’re definitely not small potatoes… The thing is that desperate times call for desperate measures and as I was basically sitting there watching my money dwindle away I had a change of heart.

My flight landed in Hannover, Germany on July 15th. If life’s taking me down, I’m not going without a fight…

bis später,

Coriolis