UK Semiconductor Giants – The Best Companies to Work For

After noticing that Intel made Glassdoor.com’s Top 50 Best Places to Work list, I wanted to dig a little deeper to find out how our home-grown leaders fare against this, and as it turns out the result is as top-notch as their technologies!

Both ARM and Imagination Technologies, two of the UK’s biggest success stories, scored a fantastic 3.7 and 3.6 respectively, showing they can give Intel’s impressive 4.0 a run for its money in the coming years.

An ARM employee said “It is great to work for a very successful company at the forefront of the tech and communications industry.” (They are) “Increasingly involved in new markets - servers, internet of things etc - which brings lots of opportunities for personal growth and development.  The company strongly promotes a healthy work culture whether work/life balance, work environment, general health and well-being and respect for your peers.”

A view that is fully supported by ARM’s exceptionally well run promotion program, and the fact that many of their engineers spend their entire careers there very happily. Imagination, the relative ‘youngster’ of the two, embraces its recent success by remaining true to their young, friendly atmosphere, allowing their engineers to flourish as they choose, with the full backing of the company;

“Friendly people, exciting company philosophy, it is really interesting to work there. The company is leader on the GPU for mobiles market, and so the projects are amazing. Not too much pressure from the hierarchy, we can feel really involved in the company achievements.”

(Engineers at Imagination) “Develop leading technology across multiple fields so there are numerous interesting projects to be part of / learn about. Growing very rapidly so opportunities for career development as teams have to scale. Very exciting times as the company becomes more well-known and talked about. Invests heavily in its employees so it’s not a company people want to leave.”

Well done Britain, we do love working here!

The UK ASIC market: not-so-little Britain

How times have changed from a few years ago!

The ASIC market in the UK has come a long way from the murkiness of 2009, and, happily, we’ve since seen the demand for top-notch ASIC / SoC designers increasing year on year.

This has, in large part, been as a result of the enormous success of “home grown” powerhouses such as Imagination and ARM. But success breeds success, therefore in recent years we’ve seen an energising trend with foreign companies recognising and tapping into UK design competencies and setting up shop on our shores; NVIDIA's acquisition of Icera and Samsung’s purchase of part of CSR being two recent high profile examples. This has resulted in a lively market in areas from telecommunications and wireless communications to digital media to GPU computing.

There’s no doubt that the silicon landscape in the UK has changed; we’re now seeing strong UK-owned market leaders intermingled with myriad overseas investors; many of whom are calling for experts in RTL Design, Verification and Physical Design.

All this makes for a very optimistic outlook for the rest of the year!