Validation Engineer / Test And Measurement Software Engineer
Eindhoven, Netherlands
Before a chip can be mass-produced, the design needs to be tested. A few chips are then produced which need to be tested in great detail. This process takes several months of time, much equipment, new PCB designs and a clear plan of how to perform the tests. The Validation engineer is responsible for all this. He needs to make sure before the validation phase that he understands the silicon to be tested and that everything is prepared. During the validation phase he needs to align with the designers in case of unclarity, problems and for result evaluation. The products that were validated included top-of-the-line A/D and D/A converters, PLL's and high speed communication receivers and transmitters (e.g. USB3.0). Due to the high performance of the products, it was often difficult to find equipment good enough to measure the modules with enough resolution. The slightest imperfection would result in the result being unusable.Next to the actual validation activities, my work encompassed more generally creating software for lab activities. I built a framework to help myself to make this easier, and allow lab engineers and designers to perform relatively simple tasks by themselves. It involved communication with instruments, measurements automation, results processing, and - very important - interfacing the chip's settings registers. To prevent human errors here, I parsed files coming straight from the design process, which (for lab activities) had not been done in the company before.