What path has your career taken since graduation? 

I spent the first year and a half after graduation working as an Embedded Software Engineer for one of the classic British HiFi audio equipment manufacturer. It was great being part of a small engineering team working on products that were completely new for the company. However, I also realised how much I miss Edinburgh, so I ended up coming back to Edinburgh as a Verification Engineer at Cirrus Logic. 

What is your current role?

Digital Design Verification is an important discipline in ASIC development world that is often overlooked. To be completely honest, I never heard of this domain while I was at the university. This is a shame, as this is a very curios field - here Digital Design meets Software Engineering. In my day to day, I work a lot with SystemVerilog writing complex testbenches for mixed signal designs. In the testbenches, we are trying to recreate the complete environment or system in which the chip will be used after it is taped out, and checking that it behaves as expected. There is usually quite a lot of signal processing and analysis involved, too, so I was glad I still remember my FFTs from uni coursework :)  

What experiences do you feel helped you get to your current position?

I managed to have internships every summer starting after year 2, and all of them were in the fields relevant to my degree. This and the 6-month placement helped me build a strong CV by the time I was graduating. But the most rewarding experience was participating in the Edinburgh Uni Hyperloop team - I learnt a lot and there was always a lot to talk about in the job interviews!

How have you used the skills and/or knowledge developed during your degree in your career?

A lot of my coursework in the final 2 years of studies I ended up applying in my placement and graduate jobs. Working with FPGAs and microcontrollers in the labs prepared opened up multple career pathways straight away. It was easy to build up on this when I started working in the ASIC deisgn industry, as the main development languages are same. Signal processing is also someting I use very often in my job.

What advice would you give to students who are interested in your area of work?

Finding relevant internships is probably the most important thing in the end. But for me it was taking part in HypED. You meet so many interesting people, get to work with some concepts that you would hardly come across otherwise, so futuristic and advanced they are, and it is just a lot of fun! So if you get a chance to sign up for Formula Student, Hyperloop or other engineering projects at uni - go for it!

This profile was published in April 2024