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United States News Title: Outsourcing jobs to China and other nations 1) Embedded: FPGA Toolkit Supports Hard And Soft Processor Designs 2687 2) Existing Technologies Give Birth To New Energy Solutions 680 3) Build A Smart Battery Charger Using A Single-Transistor Circuit 589 4) ZiLOG MCUs Power Space-Elevator Prototype 540 5) Virtually Real 525 ALL TOP 20 >> RELATED ARTICLES: • Harris Poll: Outsourcing Of U.S. Jobs Very Unpopular Decisions to ship high-tech jobs offshore have become more the norm in executive boardrooms across the U.S. The ensuing fallout is telling: The unemployment rate for American EEs reached an all-time high of 6.2% in 2003 versus 4.2% in 2002—a 47.6% spike. The trend is likely to continue according to data from Gartner Inc., a leading market-research firm on the global information technology industry. One out of every four high-technology jobs in developed nations today will be outsourced to emerging markets such as India by 2010. "Global sourcing has become a mainstream delivery model," says Ian Marriott, a Gartner vice president. Though production of U.S. electronics equipment continues to migrate to Asia, particularly to China, most of the semiconductors for this equipment still comes from U.S.-based companies. Some of these U.S.-based semiconductor suppliers have outsourced chip production, assembly, and test to Asia. On the other hand, many others continue to maintain extensive manufacturing and design operations in the U.S., keeping thousands of Americans employed in high-paying, high-tech jobs. But the past few months have seen those sands shift. Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector says it's moving about 50 design engineering jobs to China and India to cut costs. Intel opened a wireless R&D center in Korea. And, Xerox turned the manufacturing of its printers over to Flextronics International of Singapore, the largest contract manufacturer, which reported late last year that its quarterly revenue passed $4 billion for the first time, along with a net profit versus a year-earlier loss. The fallout from outsourcing has even had its ironic twists. Take d3 Engineering. Between its military contract for integrating imaging devices into mortar shells and its work with Texas Instruments' third-party DSP network, d3 Engineering continues to grow. Consequently, Scott W. Reardon, the young president of the Rochester, N.Y.-based company, needed to hire several new engineers. "We had to staff up, and we found lots of qualified people right down the road—at Kodak," which is now outsourcing more of its design, development, and manufacturing offshore. A MORE COMPLEX PICTURE Newly released semiconductor data from iSuppli Corp., another leading market-research firm, reveals a more complex picture of Americans employed in chip design and manufacturing jobs. The outsourcing trend presents both an upside and downside: The Asia/Pacific region, which includes China, accounted for 39.9% of global semiconductor sales in 2003, up from 37.4% in 2002 and 29.9% in 2001. This makes Asia/Pacific the largest chip-consuming region in the world. In comparison, the share of semiconductor consumption in the Americas region shrank from near parity with Asia/Pacific in 2001, at 27.5%, to 20.1% in 2003. Despite the shift in semiconductor consumption to Asia, Americas-based companies continue to dominate worldwide chip sales. Americas-based semiconductor suppliers accounted for 48.7% of worldwide chip revenue in 2002. The domination of Americas-based companies is even more pronounced in the Asia-Pacific region. Companies headquartered in the Americas accounted for 51.2% of semiconductor sales in the Asia/Pacific region in 2003. Small business also is becoming a significant driver for the U.S. economy and employment. In the semiconductor industry, new companies are usually fabless and outsource their production to chip manufacturers. An estimated 75.1% of revenue in the worldwide fabless industry in 2003 was generated by American-based companies. According to iSuppli, 56.8% of global fabless semiconductor demand originated from the Asia/Pacific region in 2003, supporting this key U.S. business. Dale Ford, vice president of market intelligence services for iSuppli, says strong chip sales to the Asia/Pacific region are keeping American workers employed in semiconductor manufacturing and design jobs. WHERE ARE THE JOBS? But what about new jobs? "My sense from speaking with EEs is that there is still a job problem, but hiring has just begun to pick up," says Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and chair of the IEEE-USA's Career & Workforce Policy Committee. In fact, an informal survey of online job postings of mostly large American electronics companies suggests a broad range of available engineering positions across the country. Some of the findings: National Semiconductor recently posted about 25 U.S.-based engineering positions (including eight design-engineering slots). Intel recently listed 19 design-engineering positions on its Web site. AMD says it's looking for 18 design EEs to work in Sunnyvale and 25 in Austin. Analog Devices Inc. lists about 30 "new" engineering jobs on its Web site. "We're still looking aggressively for analog people, mostly right out of school," says Doug Grant, director of business development in the RF and Wireless Business Unit of ADI's DSP and Systems Products Group. http://Dice.com, a high-tech industry Web site, recently listed 7289 openings across the U.S. for design engineers, CMOS RFIC engineers, IP design engineers, RFIC design engineers, design processing engineers, senior IC digital design engineers, embedded design engineers, analog circuit design engineers, and test equipment design engineers. It also posted more than 1000 openings for technical sales positions. Texas Instruments and Qualcomm recently sponsored career fairs in San Diego to bolster their wireless engineering staffs in the area. TI said it received about 600 resumes and about 250 engineers actually attended the fair for 50 job openings. "We have plenty of candidates, but we're looking for top talent, so we are very selective in who we hire," a TI official said. "We are now reviewing all the resumes and are interested in a number of candidates." Ben Hamson, Qualcomm's senior director of staffing, said that about 4500 people attended the Qualcomm fair. The company has about 500 current openings for hardware and software engineers ranging from recent graduates to industry veterans, most of which will be based in San Diego. (In March, Qualcomm said that it may set up a research facility in India that would employ about 100 people to develop chip sets and software.) Rockwell, Md.-based InHand Electronics, which specializes in handheld-device technology, handed out flyers at the recent ElectronicaUSA show in San Francisco, looking for hardware and embedded software engineers to help develop its new Intel XScale and other ARM processor-based devices.
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