Hello, I am an EE undergrad in my third year and am applying for an internship at a fairly well-known semiconductor company. The position is a yield engineering intern position. I am wondering what kind of work should be expecting for this role.

Thank you!

 

Anyone?

 

Ask the company. They know a lot more about what the work for that position is better than any of us would.

 

The difficulty is that this is a specialist field, but also job titles tend to get distanced from the actual work in hand. Maximising yield is a vital function in the semiconductor business, but I'd not like to guess what might be asked of you.

As an intern, I wouldn't expect much. The experience might be useful, at least as a foot in the door, but too often nowadays some companies regard interns simply as a means of getting dead-end jobs done for zero pay. I hope this will not apply to you, but beware of being taken for a sucker. Good luck!

 

A very short description from Intel:

"Yield engineers work closely with process engineers to improve product yield and to troubleshoot process flow from root causes to equipment tuning."

Some more concrete information in this lecture:

http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee290h/fa05/Lectures/PDF/lecture%201%20intro%20IC%20Yield.pdf

Next to the obvious need to understand semiconductor manufactoring processes, it seems that a good knowledge of statistics would be useful.

I too have heard some stories about interns that were used as slaves. On the other hand, if it is a fairly big company, they need to hire engineers in the future, and evaluating the performance of an intern is a relatively safe way to find a good candidate. So I would not worry too much about beeing "abused" there (but this is based on my experience made in Germany and in a very different branch.)

One other thing would personally worry me more, not so much about the internship, but if you choose it as a career: As has already been said, maximising yield is vitally important for each company. Together with the "Troubleshooting" aspect, that might mean you will be one of the guys who receive very urgent phone calls in the middle of the night, if something goes wrong with production... Just an idea, maybe I'm just paranoid.

 

Thanks for the replies! The interview went well and he said that a good background in the processing stages and statistics will be a great base to have for this position.

 

On the other hand ... I worked for a company that hired interns and I gave them real engineering work to do. Had to start them out slow ... at first they took more work from me to supervise than they contributed. But they quickly came up to speed and by the 2nd or 3rd semester I had them they were working as junior engineers. I still keep in touch with one of them.

Another benefit of being an intern is you get to see what EE's do in the real world. I had one intern that was useless. I could not get her to do even the simplest tasks. Even when I explained and helped her she could not wire up and get working even the simplest circuit. To make a long story short, we talked to her and she realized that EE was not for her and she changed her major to Computer Science. She came back to our company later as a programming intern and did a great job.

 

One more thing,

The engineering manager and several of our engineers started with the company as interns initially. Its a good way to get your foot in the door. When it comes time to hire new graduates, they will choose the guy with experience everytime.

 

Thank you!

From what the manager had said, this is a 16 month position and tons of real work to be done!