For the past few years, with so many mergers and aquisitions, layoffs, uncertainty - is it a good idea to start a semiconductor career?
Also, is there going to any scope for Hardware in the future? or it is dead?
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You should work at Intel if you are living on the street and suffering for food or failed to stock up enough for retirement earlier in life and expect to work till you are 100 years old before retiring, or you have 15 kids through 10 women and need to pay the child support 7 times to all of them, or finally every job you have had has been the worst ever and you need another one to add to the list that tops all you have ever known to have a taker of #1 in that wonderful list of theirs.
New integrated circuits will always be needed - you could carve out a career in the design or test of these. The process technology is going to quickly plateau - or stall - then all companies will have the ability to use it. It's still very expensive to design a custom IC - hence the growth of FPGAs, which benefit from improved silicon process technology, but can be flexibly programmed for thousands of applications. You could likely carve out a good career as a FPGA developer, applying them to thousands of different projects.
I would stay out of the fab. It will quickly become a cutthroat commodity business. You'd just do sustaining, nothing new.
It you want job security in electrical engineering, go into power generation. All the EEs currently in that field are retiring.
@Ivt5B55-luh got it right, if you are in the process side you are a fool coming to intel, work crazy long hours in the fab, get pages all thru the night, dead end. Unlike if you went to make soap or oil or other processing this one is going do die a most ugly death. Of course if Intel figures out Moore's Law is ending and puts a real strategy in place besides crazy race to smaller node, IoT, Memory, and modems as their plan then maybe you have hope.
#GOLD Post
Is it a bad idea to start a career in Semiconductor Industry?
For the past few years, with so many mergers and acquisitions, layoffs, uncertainty - is it a good idea to start a semiconductor career?
Also, is there going to any scope for Hardware in the future? or it is dead?
Help all the companies build robots to replace us all.
You'd have a future until your job's done.
Better choices exist.
Hopefully every engineer took his math and understands no exponential can continue forever. All should be familiar with the fable of a rice and a checker/chess board and doubling / square.
Executives and technologist at intel like to argue the economic opportunity is so huge clever PhDs will find a way, but sadly physics cans be trumped by economic desire.
Look at the cost and silliness that was taken to bring a very ill thought out 14nm to market and double that mess for 10 and than 7nm. Intel has big fundamental problems that the foundries don't face.
I feel terrible for the young RD and manufacturing engineers. It is the aerospace industry of the late 20th century. But it isn't economics that will kill it, it is physics.
Have a parchute my children or be caught naked and alone in the jungle!
Unless there is a miracle to transfer silicon based technology to III-V, consider it completely stalled. The equipment advances required to advance to 10nm in a practical sense does not exist and may never. Moore's Law has been dead for years. Let's stick a fork in it.
Hardware, Semi = dead. Software is where it's at.