What animated your interest in IC design ?
I am curious by nature and practice electronics as a hobby. Working in IC design is the best way to cultivate that curiosity in all areas of electronics development and design: system, analog, digital and mixed signal.
What was the last functional block you worked on ?
I have been involved in the design of a high performance, mixed-signal clock synthesizer.
Why have you chosen to join SCALINX ?
I wanted to work for a medium-sized company where I was able to touch on different areas and not be only confined to one particular task/area like in larger sized companies.
Also, one of my motivation was to contribute to the development of a state-of-the-art product from design phase to the production.
What makes SCALINX stand out as an employer ?
SCALINX stands out as an employer for its highly skilled team of people in all areas of IC design.
It is a good company for acquiring experience and take on challenges with the goal of achieving state of the art performance.
New ideas are welcome and encouraged to follow!
What is your typical day at work ?
As part of my mission as top level responsible at SCALINX, I specify the chip and its constituent functional blocks to reach the stated performance.
There is no real typical day at work as it can vary depending on the needs of the day. It can either be working on the architecture of an analog/digital block, writing specification or designing an analog block.
This is what is interesting!
How do you spend your time outside working hours ?
I practice Mountain Biking and watch US TV Series in my free time.
Alexandre Asselin
What animated your interest in IC design?
I perceive the design of Integrated Circuits as an ever-challenging task for engineers. The
level of detail requires alongside each other the technical knowledge, rigor, inspiration and team work. The never-ending technical evolution will continuously make it appealing.
What was the last functional block you worked on?
I’m currently working on an innovative a high speed, high resolution Analog-Digital converter (ADC).
The never-ending evolution of CMOS processes empowers continuous improvement of IC performance and form factor size. The CMOS technology was numerous times in the past 30 years “written-off” as inappropriate technology for high performance ICs. Nowadays, experiencing the superb performance of the latest CMOS technologies, one can say, “only sky is the limit”.
Why have you chosen to join SCALINX?
Several of my colleagues described SCALINX as a company that treats its employees great, encourages them to utilise personal ambitions and creativity, and in return wins motivated and loyal employees. SCALINX also encourages its employees to become teachers and coach one another to help build a more creative, satisfied, and intimate community of employees.
What makes SCALINX stand out as an employer?
the key to SCALINX’s attraction as a workplace is constantly innovating, experimenting, and creative environment. What's beautiful about this approach is that a great environment is a self-reinforcing one, all of these efforts support one another, and together create an organization that is creative, team-work oriented, fun, hardworking, and highly productive.
What is your typical day at work?
My prime task as IC design engineer is to define and implement the required functions into
the chip I design. Number of times the exchange with colleagues, simple piece of paper and pen are the essential steps prior to putting my hands on a keyboard.
How do you spend your time outside working hours?
In my free time I like to stay current with the industry by reading trade journals and attending seminars put on by well-known experts in the field. Most of my weekends I spend biking with my friends, by the way the transportation vehicle to work is my bike.
My great passion is sailing, from the first day I discovered that sailing was extremely addictive, not only because of the direct contact with nature and the sea, but also by the number of factors affecting one’s performance.
Herve Marie
What animated your interest in IC design ?
To design state of the art ICs, every day I need to step outside my comfort zone. I like that !
What was the last functional block you worked on ?
I am currently designing high-speed amplifiers for a Continuous-Time Delta-Sigma modulator.
Why have you chosen to join SCALINX ?
Working with a group of high performing, talented and motivated individuals every day reminds me of why I chose a role with Scalinx.
There is a great atmosphere. We all pull in the same direction to bring Scalinx on the top 5 of the world mixed signal IC companies.
What makes SCALINX stand out as an employer?
This company is absolutely people centric with its prime focus always on its human capital.
Scalinx values my work, my efforts, and my opinion.
What is your typical day at work?
No day is exactly like the one before and the one thing I truly appreciate is that each morning brings a new challenge and a new opportunity to learn.
How do you spend your time outside working hours?
As I live quite close to the office, I can maximise time with my family.
Lionel Guiraud
What animated your interest in IC design ?
I’ve always been attracted by technology making life easier and more fun. Amazed by the creative power of electronics and its broad applications, I played with electronics as a teenager, and naturally became a designer in microelectronics few years after. Three decades later, I still enjoy working in this profession, sharing this passion with a design-team.
When IC-designing, I very much like creating and taking up sharp technical challenges that make product better fit customer needs and even more competitive. Besides, to reach this goal, I’m very keen on dealing with complex design-tools and design functionalities, making the most of them to improve IC performances.
I consider IC-design and microelectronic fabric pretty much like the art of mastering the physics of the electron.
It’s a great example of an incredible, difficult and subtle human adventure “Man vs. Nature”.
The power of human intelligence seems limitless, but nobody can cheat playing with the rules of physics.
Everyone in the design-team has to feel responsible of every detail among millions. A single neglected technical detail can ruin the design effort of the full team, requiring another nanometric fabric processing cycle at huge cost.
This is what makes IC-designing a fabulous school of humility: whatever the experience level you have, you’ve got to always learn, always accept to carry out self-examination vs. physics.
I like it a lot.
What was the last functional block you worked on ?
I recently designed a calibration controller using digital techniques. The main goal of this function is to correct dynamically small analog design flaws, and boost IC technical performances in order to have a more competitive product. I enjoyed very much this challenge because it’s a great co-design example of digital serving analog expertise leveraging together the performances of the IC.
This key-element of the final application allows enhanced performance for the customer end product. Being a contributor in this challenging innovation process is highly exciting.
Why have you chosen to join SCALINX ?
I strongly believe that professional success key-point is firmly linked to mutual trust and direct communication within the design-team. When I realized some old fellow designers were already part of the SCALINX, I joined the team right away, happy to share the same IC-design passion with the team and transmit my experience to the juniors.
Being more confident in what we can deliver as a team-work, aware of the solid experience in ICs development up to industrial product we can bring altogether, made me jump into SCALINX adventure !
What makes SCALINX stand out as an employer ?
I’m convinced that diversity is a rich and winning value in every human enterprise.
SCALINX grows up this point of view, developing an excellent working synergy between employees. As a matter of fact, international talents already work together well, as well as juniors and seniors, and all complementary design-skills like: architects vs. designers, analog vs. digital designers, project technical manager vs. design-team.
In SCALINX, there is already this precious working culture of bridging the gaps where natural barriers exist due to sharp technical expertise or cultural boundaries. I really enjoy contributing to make this happen and I’m quite sure SCALINX product success will sand out of this positive culture.
I think SCALINX recruitment really makes the difference by fulfilling most of the employee constraints.
What is your typical day at work ?
My day at work looks typical from the outside but never from the inside.
Most of the day, I’m sitting at my double-screen workstation in the open-space share with colleagues. This office layout allow us to mutually exchange each others information and technical point of views. I consider that important to act as a real team-player in our way of working.
As the project-team works in multi-sites, I never hesitate to use also remote chatting or tele-conferences for technical reviews or points to share.
What happens inside my workstation deals with different design-steps and design-tools:
Architecture a digital function, code it in high-level language, simulate to verify it, synthesize it with library elements, and process all different steps of physical implementation.
Running this design process is exciting because it’s full of various steps and different everyday technical challenges. These challenges may impact the work of other designers and require other design iteration until fully validated.
Typical day may be, but absolutely not routine.
How do you spend your time outside working hours ?
Actually, I’m a lucky designer living by the seaside in Normandy. So most of the time, I try to take benefit of it during out-of-office hours. On water, I practice leisure sailing and windsurfing in a club, and by the beach I like hiking, jogging, and biking from time to time. Enjoying both fitness and social contact, I’m seeking to share these various outdoor activities with friends or sport enthusiasts.
Occasionally I also help out with sound engineering for a kids choir performing live in my village.
The rest of the time, when I have no other good excuse than practicing my favorite water-sport, I’ve got to do my home-work like a bit of gardening maintenance.
That’s all my way of stressing away after work.
