Nitza Basoco

In the fiercely competitive semiconductor industry, companies are in a constant battle to retain top talent because in the heart of every good engineer is a passionate problem solver, looking for their next challenge. For them, innovation is the currency of success. Yet companies like Qualcomm, Intel, and Broadcom attract tens of thousands every year by dangling lucrative compensation packages to lure them from competitors. Startup leaders don’t have those resources, so they have to work harder to attract the best talent and then fight like hell to retain them. But some of the most successful startup leaders I know take a different approach. Rather than viewing attraction and retention as a fight, they leverage the inherent qualities of their companies as their advantage. They use their nimbleness, bias toward innovation, and their collaborative cultures like superpowers to attract the right people and those usually end up being the reasons why people stay. Take Richard Fung, CEO of The Six Semiconductor, for example. I had a conversation with Richard and asked him to share his approach to motivating his team. His response was like a mini-masterclass on the topic of talent attraction and retention. Richard emphasized that a culture that encourages engineers to dive deep into the intricacies of their craft, understand the systems they’re building, and connect with the end customer is a successful culture. Richard has been using this approach and it's been paying dividends for The Six Semiconductor so in his honor, here are his six key concepts for creating this type of organization: 1. Foster a Learning Culture: Support ongoing learning and skill development beyond employees' core responsibilities. 2. Prioritize Customer Focus: Embed a customer-centric mindset, and encourage employees to enhance user experiences through their work. 3. Champion Problem-Solving: Empower employees to creatively solve challenges with a focus on customer needs. 4. Promote System-Level Understanding: Encourage employees to grasp the bigger picture of the company's offerings and their role within it. 5. Break Down Silos: Promote collaboration to ensure a comprehensive understanding of projects across teams. 6. Offer Meaningful Challenges: Provide intellectually stimulating projects that make a tangible impact on the company's success. What Richard highlighted is that success goes much deeper than getting great people to join. It's about unleashing the full potential of every individual on your team to drive innovation and help shape the company, and ensuring your team heads in the right direction together. I’m thrilled I got to learn Richard’s perspective and believe other leaders can benefit from hearing it, so I shared the video below. My "challenge question" to other startup leaders is this: what are you doing to foster this type of culture in your organization? Either share below or, feel free to DM me. #semiconductorindustry #startup #leadership

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Today, WGNSTAR had the honor of discussing the future of fabs with SEMI and Analog Devices at the SEMI Pacific NW Forum. While AI is a powerful tool, nothing can replace the human connection you get from meeting candidates. Carly Petrovic shared the importance of introducing young students to the semiconductor industry early on. With a labor shortage in the industry, it's crucial to develop the future workforce now. Feeling empowered after today's discussion! #SEMI #AnalogDevices #futureoftech #semiconductorindustry #AI #workforcedevelopment

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Attracting semiconductor talent requires a fresh approach. As our industry faces a potential shortfall of skilled technicians, computer scientists, and engineers by the end of this decade, it is critical for companies to adopt bold new strategies to attract, engage, and retain talent. I recently shared the innovative strategies we’re implementing in 2024 to EETimes, read to learn more: Attracting Chip Talent in 2024 Requires New Strategies - EE Times

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"Scotty we need more power!" For those of use old enough to remember Star Trek TOS (and if you don't know what that is I'll wait for you to visit the wikipedias...) this phrase is burned indelibly into our brains. Invariably some nefarious force was holding the Enterprise against its will, or the ship was trying to outrun a baddie, or an incoming energy bolt threatened the integrity of the hull, and always the solution was "more power". The world we live in today is quite different. Not to say that the need for compute power has reduced, in fact quite the opposite given the enormous computational requirements of modern AI and HPC workloads. But that "power" must now be weighed against the power (energy) required to use it. In AI it's no longer about TOPS, it's about TOPS/W. And a laptop that dramatically outperformed its competitors but had only a 30 minute battery life would be considered fairly useless. So when the power (energy) requirements of datacenters start to be measured as a percentage of global energy consumption it's easy to see why managing and reducing power (energy) is a critical part of modern designs. Enter the Movellus Aeonic Power product family. By integrating the power supply for components of an SoC the power (energy) can be made more localized, smarter, more efficient, and the overall demand for energy can be reduced significantly. So rather than running all of your compute cores or AI acceleration clusters full tilt when only a few are needed, you can now modulate power at the core or block or cluster level to reduce the energy to precisely what is needed and no more, and this fine grained power control can yield immediate benefits. Advanced power savings like this were once attainable only by the largest and most advanced teams on the planet, but the field has been leveled. If you want to know more just send me a note, or come visit us at DAC 2024. Or just keep burning more energy than you have to, reducing your competitiveness and decreasing reliability, that's an option too... #AI #PowerDelivery #DAC2024

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ICYMI: Power, performance, and area/cost have been the three optimization targets for decades, but are they relevant in today’s complex systems? Semiconductor Engineering explores this topic, with comments from Expedera. https://ow.ly/HOs150Tmef5

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Check out my new blog on using our #radhard #MCU to reconfigure #Space deployed #FPGA. Please reach out if you have interest and we can provide specific details on how to deploy

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