We caught up with Parker Ridd who is an SoC design engineer at Intel. Parker's work impacts something we all care about - battery life! He shares with us the types of problems he solves and how is work directly impacts his favorite financial benefit.Describe What You Do and What a Typical Day Looks Like.I am part of the SoC Design team. I design processors and integrate different units so we can sell them. I specifically work on the power unit which controls the power and performance of the chip. So, if we needed to design a product with higher batter life, it could impact my part of the design quite a bit. So what I do in a typical day is work on features that need to be implemented or work on bugs that have been discovered in my features to get them corrected.
How do you feel like you are making an impact in your job?Because of what I do, devices that have Intel chips have great battery life.
What problems do you solve?Because of the central role that I have, I have to talk to a lot of people because the power unit controls the power for all different parts of the chip. Since there are so many people involved with the design of the chip, the hardest problem I help solve is how all these components need to work together so that we can deliver a product with the intended features and specifications that the chip is supposed to have.
What fulfills you about your job?Knowing that my work has huge influence in the end design of the chips that I see in live products all over the world.
What is your favorite benefit here?The quarterly profit bonus. It’s cool to know that part of your work impacts the amount of bonus that I get, in particular, seeing how the products that I work on are impacting Intel’s bottom line.
What do you like about Intel’s culture?It is a very driven culture. A lot of people come to together to solve difficult problems. And when someone makes a mistake or introduces a bug, people are not focused blaming someone for the problem, instead the focus is fixing the bug. Because of this, our culture is one where people are not afraid to make mistakes and try new things.
Have you benefited from mentorships?I have weekly meetings with a principal engineer here. Because of this, she has opened doors for me including working on the team using a tool called Lint which I had been wanting to do.
Learn more about our careers in SoC Design.
