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According to our 2007 Reader Survey, Asian engineers will make an average of $111,952 in total compensation this year, compared to $102,272 for non-Asians - or nearly 10% more. This is despite the fact that Asian engineers are typically younger and significantly less experienced. They also have spent less time in their present position and with their current firm than their non-Asian counterparts. This discrepancy in income is consistent with data we've seen in...

Engineering has been a tough profession over the past few years. Averse to market risk in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the market constrained its investment in R&D. Offshore outsourcing and an influx of lower-priced labor exerted a downward pressure on salaries and other compensation. And, uncertainty about the future had a chilling effect on engineers' hopes and dreams. But things seem to be warming up. According to our...

Which suits you better: a large multinational conglomerate that comes with its own cafeteria and gym, or a small startup in an office park with a Wendy's down the street? According to our 2007 Reader Survey, engineers at larger firms (those with 1000 or more employees) earn an average income of $110,602, compared to the $94,169 brought home by their peers at the small design houses (firms with fewer than 100 employees). In addition to better pay, large...

Times are pretty good, as 86% of today's engineers say they're generally satisfied in their current job. But not everyone feels the same. Which engineers are most likely to be unhappy? On the surface, they appear to be typical engineers in terms of age, gender, race, hours worked, and years of experience. However, disgruntled engineers are more likely to be underpaid and/or work for larger organizations (those with annual revenues averaging $3.2 billion). ...

The average U.S. engineer now makes $102,748 in salary and bonuses, marking the first time EEs have reached six figures in the four years that we've done our salary surveys. And there's more good news, as the engineering and tech services industry added 66,300 jobs last year, putting that number at an all-time high. But there are troublesome signs behind this rosy picture. While base salaries are up 7%, bonuses are flat. Stock options and other...

Perhaps better than most people, engineers understand the difference between dreams and reality. After all, they're often presented with someone's dream (in the form of a design specification) and then are asked to make it real. Engineers face a similar challenge in their own careers. Like everyone else, they have a picture in their minds of how they'd like their careers to go. Then they're confronted with what's possible and what isn't. So, they...

For many, "Vice President in charge of R&D" sounds like a good job - reputable, good pay, and maybe even exciting. But tack the words "at Apple Inc." to the end of that title, and you have, well, a whole different barrel of apples. Steve Wozniak didn't earn this job with a good resume. He forged it, inventing the first single-circuit motherboard with embedded ROM in 1975. He and Steve Jobs had to sell their most valuable possessions to assemble a product...

The only thing that’s more important to engineers than the project on their table is the next project to come down the line—at least, it should be. The electronic industry is constantly being reinvented as new technologies keep Moore’s Law perpetually valid and thriving. After all, today’s high-end transistors, semiconductors, and other components are tomorrow’s landfill. Two key elements in keeping the...

I think that today’s graduating engineers could be better prepared. Learning formulas and practicing book problems, while sometimes necessary, do little to prepare for actual design and real-world issues. The best way to learn about electronics and engineering is to build a circuit while learning about the relevant design principles. For example, I recently built a switching power supply for nixie tubes. At first,...

Most engineering undergraduates end their post-secondary education with an EE or local equivalent. Many physics graduate students were engineering physics undergraduates, with perhaps a mix of engineering and physics. They spent four years learning about their specialty. However, all the education in the world cannot replace hands-on experience in the real world. Those students who go on to a master’s program or are doctoral candidates...

Ryan Patterson considers himself lucky. As a toddler, he started "tinkering" by stuffing knives into electrical outlets and twisting light bulbs into sockets. He watched his dad wire their family home, and he absorbed the basics like current flow and hooking up motors and switches. By the time he was going off to high school, he had built two robots. "I feel really lucky because I've always had a natural interest in electronics," Patterson says....

In his senior year at the University of California, Electronic Design reader Thanh Nguyen remembers the chair of the physics department cancelling class so students and professors could watch NASA's firstever shuttle launch. As Columbia lifted off on April 12, 1981, Nguyen's dreams of working for NASA were just taking flight. "I remember sitting in the physics department's conference room and watching the shuttle lift off flawlessly for the first...

Welcome to this year's edition of Your Most Important Issue of the Year. A major focus of this year's issue is "Dream Jobs." This got me thinking about my own job and how it all started for me. As an engineering student at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, I wrote a paper for my control engineering class - something to do with damped oscillations of a particular control circuit. I added all the necessary illustrations, tables,...

I usually like standards. They can crop up in standards organizations and committees and make it easier to plug things together. Then, de facto standards can grow organically - and get pushed by companies with big bucks. Unfortunately, such pushing often results in standards that don't necessarily provide interoperability. Likewise, there can be issues as to whether a standard is open or closed. Closed standards tend to limit the field, often allowing vendors to maintain...

Silicon Systems' SiliconDrive USB 10-pin Module plugs into the 10-pin USB 2.0 header found on most motherboards, thereby providing a rugged, solid-state bootable device. It's available in versions up to 4 Gbytes and incorporates Silicon System's PowerArmor and SiSmart technology (see "Solving The Wear And Tear Of Flash Memory" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 12120). Pricing starts at $199. Silicon...

The fanless iGO17/19 widescreen LCD panels from iGoLogic house a 1.5-GHz Celeron processor, 512 Mbytes of double-data-rate(DDR) RAM, 802.11b/g wireless local-area network (WLAN)support, a Compact Flash socket,and a 2.5-in.,40-Gbyte hard disk. The 16.6-by 12.5- by 3.3-in. case has VESA mountings.The motherboard includes five serial ports, two Fast Ethernet ports, four USB 2.0 ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse interfaces, and AC'97 audio support. The Integrated Intel 852GM display interface...

Typical general-purpose symmetrical multiple-processor (SMP) multicore designs contain about eight cores. Specialized architectures, on the other hand, push the number of cores into the hundreds. Tilera ups the ante for SMP with its 64- core/tile Tile64 chip (see the figure). Its iMesh interconnect incorporates five different packet networks with five switches per tile (see the table)....

Home multimedia devices will start sporting the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) logo this year, and the number of products adopting this standard will likely increase. Most vendors of multimedia hardware are members of DLNA and have access to its standards. The cost of joining is minimal, and it's a requirement for getting devices DLNA-logo certified. Meanwhile, we can provide a little insight into the structure and operation of DLNA devices...

The best just keep getting better. Version 8.5 of National Instruments' Lab- VIEW graphical programming environment brings a lot to the design table, like enhanced multicore support including integration with FPGAs. Among its impressive improvements, NI has spruced up LabVIEW's multicore support. LabVIEW has supported multithreading for years, but the plethora of multicore platforms makes it more important for developers to be able to...

Ethernet continues to reign atop the list of high-speed interconnects, even as it moves into the 10-Gbit/s space (see "High-Speed Serial Technology Drives Board Interconnects" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 15348). Combine this with the emerging PCI Express I/O virtualization, and the result is Intel's new 82598 10-Gbit/s Ethernet controller and its cousin, which uses the 1-Gbit/s 82575 chip (see "I/O Virtualization," ED Online 15358). ...