From Staff Engineer to Student: Why I Went Back to School

It has been six years since I started my career in the semiconductor industry. While the work has been challenging and exciting, I always felt there was unfinished business. After a gap of eight years since my undergraduate degree, I finally saw an opportunity to go back and truly understand the basics that I skimmed over (or completely missed!!) during my Bachelor’s.

The “Black Box” Problem

In Analog Layout, we often receive a schematic from the design team that is treated as “The Holy Scripture.” We don’t question the connections; we just draw them. We don’t ask why the designer chose that specific topology; we just ensure it passes LVS and that the density looks good.

But as I moved deeper into advanced nodes, I realized that treating the schematic as a black box was a limitation.

I found myself wanting to look under the hood. I didn’t just want to view a transistor as a P-cell with a specific Width and Length that needed to fit in a specific area. I wanted to understand the device itself.

I wanted to revisit the fundamentals that often get lost in the daily grind of tape-out deadlines. How does the MOSFET actually work at a physics level? Why does the gain drop if I route this differently? What are the impedance implications of this topology?

I realized that to be a better engineer, I couldn’t just rely on tool automation or design rules. I needed to understand the basic electronics i.e. the “first principles” that dictate why the circuit exists in the first place and how it works.

The Decision

So, in a move that my friends described as “ambitious” and my sleep schedule described as “catastrophic,” I enrolled in the M.Tech in VLSI Design program at BITS Pilani. It has been a humbling experience, to say the least.

The “Walk in the Park” Fallacy

I graduated in 2017. Stepping back into a lecture setting after more than eight years was a shock to the system.

I’ll be honest: I took it lightly at first. I thought, “I’ve been working in this industry for six years. I deal with this stuff every day. This will be a walk in the park.”

I was wrong.

The struggle to keep my eyes open during early morning lectures on a weekend was real. You think you are prepared, but trying to absorb heavy derivation math at 8:00 AM on a Saturday, after a full work week, is a different kind of endurance sport.

And in an academic setting, if you blink, you miss it. I learned the hard way that if you miss a lecture, they don’t go away, they multiply!

The backlog started to pile up. I found myself in the classic desperate student mode: watching recorded lectures at 2x speed, trying to absorb complex designs and theory in half the time.

Before I knew it, the mid-semester exams were knocking on the door. I had little more than a week to cover 8 lectures for 4 subjects each! Between the assignments, the labs, and my actual day job, it was a lot.

Lessons Learned (The Hard Way)

I survived the first semester, but I came away with some massive realizations that I’m taking into Semester 2:

• Don’t Slack (Seriously): You cannot cram Analog Design. Unlike some subjects where you can memorize a few definitions the night before, this field requires consistency. If you lose the thread in Week 3, Week 4 will look like hieroglyphics.
• It’s Not a Spectator Sport: Reading the theory can only take you so far. Analog design theory is useless if you don’t actually design and simulate circuits. You need to put in the hours on the tools. You need to see the waveform fail, debug the biasing, and fix it. That is where the actual learning happens.
• The Goal is Knowledge, Not Grades: The objective isn’t just to pass the exams. The objective is to really learn. I’m not doing this for a piece of paper; I’m doing this so I can look at a schematic and actually understand the story it’s telling.

With these hard-earned lessons (and hopefully a better strategy for weekend mornings), I am now on to the second semester. It’s going to be a busy couple of years, but I’m ready for it!