Cadence has an intern program that goes under the name CHIPs, for college hires and internship programs. I gave some background on it last year in my post CHIPs in the Cadence Cafeteria, and the year before in CHIP: College Hire and Internship Program. So in some ways this is a 2019 update.

Last week the Intern Showcase was back in the Cadence cafeteria. There were 63 interns presenting their work. The levels range from undergraduate, through masters, to PhD candidates. I'll describe a few of the projects later, mainly as a way of showing the breadth of work. 

Interns Around the World

Cadence has 358 interns in 2019, spread around 12 formal site programs, as shown on the map. The overall breakdown is:

• Americas 133 interns
• EMEA 42
• APAC 29
• India 154

Projects

OpenAccess is the database originally created by Cadence and since transferred to Si2. Freda Li (of UC Irvine) and Jersey Deng (of UCLA) are in the middle of a project to speed up getting time stamps. The current API requires an entire table to be read in order to inspect the timestamp and thus see if anything in the table has changed. This takes a lot of time and space to simply read a single number. The project provides a way to read the timestamp directly by just reading the table-of-contents and not the entire table. The project resulted in essentially 100% reduction in CPU time (since it was too small to measure) and a 97% reduction in wall-clock time.

Simran Ahuja (of UC Irvine) worked on creating an app for Cadence Online Support, starting with mockups in Balsamiq and proceeding to a prototype, and, later in the summer, perhaps a basis for a real product.

Keertana Settaluri and Elias Fallon worked on a problem that has defeated solution for decades, namely automating some aspects of analog design. Algorithmic approaches in the past have not been good enough, so they are using a neural network approach to find substructures (such as differential pairs) that require handling appropriately to automate the layout. Various approaches were tried but assisted and semi-assisted learning seems the most promising.

Amit Kachroo (of Oklahoma State University) had done a project on gesture recognition using radar. That's the radar in the little box on the left. The gestures come from a standard dataset. He is using machine learning to identify the gestures, which are dynamic—each gesture in the picture to the right is a vertical column.

Finally (remember, there were over 50 more projects than I've been able to mention here) Alan Peral of UC Santa Cruz (yay, go banana slugs) worked on visualization for thermal analysis, mixing electrical and thermal simulation as is required, since heat dissipation depends on current and current depends on temperature. 

Learn More

If you are interested in being an intern, or you are a new grad interested in employment, we have a page for you. For the last five years, Cadence has been on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list. It's a great place to be an intern too, as over 350 people at a dozen sites around the world can attest. And see my post Why Millennial Engineers Should Work for Cadence to get an idea about just how impactful working at Cadence is in the world.

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