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What are the future prospects of biotechnology students?

What are the future prospects for students with specialization in communications with applied signal processing?

  • It is always my dream to be a part of Communication innovations. Ever since I started understanding little of this universe, “I wanted to be a communication engineer” and probably the only reason why I chose to work in ‘X’ (my current company) over CISCO among my offers. I have completed my Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communications.  Now my dream is bigger and I want to be a part of Qualcomm, the company which redefined the term “Communications!!!!”.  My MS  is dedicated to understand most of communications with applied signal processing and finally end up in my dream job in Qualcomm. Currently I am working as a DSP firmware developer in the modem division. I intend to continue with the wireless modem domain (Firmware specific) I have been looking out for help from the fellow mates on the course selection in MS but I am surprised to see no one from India with my specialization!!! While I see plenty of people with VLSI .   I am little confused about the future prospectus of my area of study. Why people are hesitant ? . Can anybody  give me the insightful answer ? Update : Applied singnal processing : Use of Signal processing concepts to solve communication problems like echo cancellation,reducing power to stop interference, improve data rates with algorithms based on DSP concepts etc .

  • Answer:

    CISCO is a company that spans the telecommunications and semiconductor industries. So, I don't buy your justification of working for "X" over CISCO.  Was your "whole saga of MS" depicted in a movie? If not, what is this interesting and amazing saga that almost everybody has not heard about? Define "applied signal processing". What you mentioned is meaningless. Qualcomm??? Are you kidding me? After watching big companies like Sun Microsystems fall in recent years, you still wanna bet on certain technologies and companies? ... Trust me, this is not a good idea. Who cares about lab/code monkeys? Innovate and kill the competition. If you are pursuing radical innovation, you will fail many times... That's okay. Losing confidence and worrying about being the odd one out because your friends are doing VLSI or something else is silly. Chip design is so matured, and becoming more and more automated that unless they have skills that span the hardware/software/network stack with some domain expertise, such as computer vision, image processing, or pattern recognition, they will probably be laid off due to automation and/or offshoring/outsourcing. Couple expertise in digital signal processing (DSP) that you are trying to acquire with a background across the hardware/software/network stack. This can help you develop that require embedded DSP systems (software and hardware). These systems probably need to communicate with other systems; think "networked embedded systems" or networks of cyber-physical systems. Hence, knowing about telecommunications and computer networking would help a lot here. This spans VLSI design, transaction-level modeling (TLM) for platform-based design of DSP-based cyber-physical systems, embedded DSP software, and (ASIP) design methodology. If you can do this, you can tap into the hot trends of "Big Data" and the "Internet of Things". Good luck!

Pasquale Ferrara at Quora Visit the source

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Don't limit your career goals and skills to just digital signal processing for Qualcomm.  Qualcomm is a great place to learn a LOT about signal processing implementation for consumer devices--alongside wonderful colleagues (truly a great work culture).  But for the most part, signal processing for wireless communications is a mature technology.  When I started realizing this, I left Qualcomm and took the experience gained from implementing DSP algorithms at Qualcomm to implementing and designing algorithms for health/fitness applications in wearable technology. Unless you have a PhD in information theory / communications theory and have published something relevant to 5G, you will spend most of your time implementing a signal processing algorithm that the systems team has designed.  One of the main objectives at Qualcomm's DSP group is to implement widely-known signal processing routines such as low-pass filtering in a way that makes their modem consume less power than the same low-pass filter routine in a competitor's chip (such as Mediatek's modems).   You'll become an expert in implementing these algorithms in Qualcomm's own DSP (Hexagon) assembly language.   As a former leading professor in the signal processing area once told me: think of signal processing as a tool, just like physics and calculus.  Like physics and calculus, it is important to know how to use signal processing--but there are many other tools that are important to know outside of signal processing: basic data structures/algorithms, operating systems theory, machine learning, statistical analysis, scripting, systems programming, object-oriented design, etc.  The landscape of technology is changing too fast to limit yourself to one particular company (Qualcomm), let alone a particular area of expertise (signal processing).

Chris Li

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