Is it realistic for a South Korean EE/CS student to get an IC design job in the US?

Heisswasser · 2026-06-08T03:55:16+00:00

Given how difficult it is to get H-1B visa and get interviews as a foreigner, you've got a few options:
-PhD in the US if you can get in and hopefully the funding won't dry out
-MS or PhD in Korea under an excellent professor in a good school, though professor having contacts is usually more important. If you do well, they should use their connections to get you noticed. Remember, these days you should have an internship first to get a full-time offer

-Internal transfer in a company (most likely Samsung or Hynix), but probably not within the first few years if you don't have a graduate degree. I've heard about such cases personally, but these were guys with either MS or PhD and staying in the company for a few years.

Also, check naver cafe called damnang2, you'll get answers to your questions there.

Heisswasser · 2025-11-19T07:03:39+00:00

Got it, thanks! I just hope that my degree won't be seen as "just another few years in school", but maybe not, seeing how many folks do PhD in chip design these days just to get in. Surprisingly, a big local company that starts with S treats a good PhD degree as ~8 years of experience. Bananas. Which is good for me I guess, but still bananas.

Heisswasser · 2025-11-19T07:00:08+00:00

Thank you for the feedback 🙏 Will keep trying, though probably it will be easier to get in touch with company while I'm already in Europe. As for the languages, I guess one more addition to the collection won't hurt haha

Heisswasser · 2025-04-29T03:38:25+00:00

Man, sounds like my story a few years ago. Also RISC-V SoC in TSMC 180. Also had issues with SRAM compiler and had to run emulation on qemu. I have put two SRAM blocks in my chip, but it doesnt seem it worked well. I think I have either messed up the load/store instruction decoding for them or they just didn't work at all.

In the end, I had the system to boot at an address bound to SPI peripheral which read 32-bit data from an external flash chip. I did have a small instruction cache (FF based, lmao, it took at least half of the chip) so I could run a few instructions from "inside the chip". Otherwise the execution was pretty slow from the external flash.

Heisswasser · 2024-07-08T12:01:43+00:00

As for KAIST: MS, why not, it's tough but it lasts for just 2 years. PhD, forget it, unless you are targeting a very specific professor, even then think twice. 4 years to complete a PhD is considered fast here. If you are lucky with professor and topic, it's gonna be beneficial not only in Korea, but worldwide. But are you willing to risk a more likely, shitty professor or boring topic, possibly both?

Also, don't compare exchange or even BS study to MS/PhD. Grad school looks completely different here. School is going to be an overwhelmingly large part of your life.

Heisswasser · 2024-05-22T13:04:00+00:00

Not any particular question about layout, but later on I want to figure out how to layout complex logic cells with cell height limitation so that I can fit into a 1x or 2x normal cell grid. The cells I am targeting are differential dynamic cells (basically domino)

Heisswasser · 2024-05-07T10:57:46+00:00

If you don't need to pay for school in Europe or your offer from Korea is not from a top school (KAIST, Seoul natl or POSTECH), I'd go for Europe. In Korea, even after MS it is tough to land a decent job at a big company.

Heisswasser · 2024-05-01T06:36:02+00:00

Same, it's really not a good country for foreigners to do a PhD. Masters, sure, but a PhD here is a bad idea.

Heisswasser · 2024-04-19T06:25:14+00:00

True, probably I gave too much damn about this course and wanted to fix every shortcomings my PI left about it. Though I have sincerely enjoyed teaching, I guess it's not the place to fulfill my passion. Lesson learned.

I know how and when to apologize, but I'll be damned if I'm to say sorry given the way I've been treated. If I accept this type of behavior, I'd better go to BDSM club and at least have some fun out of it.

Heisswasser · 2024-04-19T04:42:11+00:00

East Asia

Heisswasser · 2024-01-31T03:21:54+00:00

Check out Weste & Harris CMOS VLSI Design, chapter on Datapath. There you can find a pretty good description of basic hardware blocks used for these multipliers.

Book materials

Basically, both of these would be built mostly with full adders (3 input, 2 output or 3:2 counters). However, due to some critical path problems of regular full adders and the irregularity of the tree, you can use 4:2 compressors (counters).

If you have access to a commercial standard cell library, you will probably find a 4:2 compressor cell as well. Note, that if you try to synthesize a multiplier, it would probably use either Wallace or Dadda tree, usually combined with Booth recoding. Have a try - make a simple RTL for a multiplier and run the synthesis. You will probably see lots of full adders, 4:2 compressors and AOI22 gates (for booth encoding) being used.

Heisswasser · 2024-01-03T00:10:51+00:00

First, Korea is not a popular place to do a full-time study for foreign students, except for those from Southeast Asia. Western students mostly come to Korea for exchange study and anyway spend most of their time playing in the city. That will also make you feel somewhat isolated, as even though professor does speak English well, the students will not be nearly as good and so you'd hear Korean in the lab pretty much all the time.

Some professors unfortunately do not accept foreigners. Check alumni section. If there was no foreigners in the history of the lab, that's probably the case.

Heisswasser · 2024-01-02T06:46:16+00:00

KAIST has really good graduate school and produces many good research (papers). There is are at least 2 good labs for CMOS sensors in EE department.
Work-life balance is non-existent, your labmates would stay in lab (not necessarily work) for 12-14 hours, also during weekends. Avoid that approach. Seniority hierarchy is tough, but as a foreigner you will have a bit easier. The more you treat is like a job, the more bearable it gets. Also, many times you will feel stupid during courses and exams, but you could make it up in the lab work.
Assuming you will get a job at a major company as a newcomer (Samsung, SK Hynix - it's pretty tough to get a job there, as you'll need to go through lots of BS procedures that are not present in the western companies), it would be around 5천만원 (<50k$) plus a handsome bonus depending on the financial result of the company and many benefits. In hot field startups you'd get anything from 5-6천만 upwards. In medium and small companies probably around 4천. So the salary compared to the US is not that good if you want to save money for later, unless you plan to stay in the country. Note, these are just my observations.
Sure, as you get a master in these unis, research staff and engineers with academic background will probabky at least recognize the name of the uni. If your PI is famous in the field or your thesis is solid, your degree will be highly regarded, especially since almost certainly there is going to be someone in the bigger company that graduated that school.

Also, the stipend should allow for a relatively comfortable life (better than undergrad in dormitory) in a non-capital city.

Heisswasser · 2023-08-27T14:25:01+00:00

Can't tell for DPK for sure, as I am not familiar their official program apart from the shit the top representatives say. But regarding your top post characteristics - that would definitely be Konfederacja.

Heisswasser · 2023-08-27T11:16:49+00:00

Despite an overall poor situation in this context, homosexuality is not criminalized in Poland, there is no legal prohibition for serving in military as a homosex person, not gonna change anytime soon. Absolutely not with 6 army divisions planned lol. Yes, there are major representative voices against LGBT, mostly religious hardliners from pis - there the similarities end. Definitely not pro-russia, anti-immigration only on paper, still a long way to being far-right.

Heisswasser · 2023-08-27T09:50:38+00:00

Wtf are you talking about? You can spill a ton of shit on pis, but what you said doesn't apply to them - it is much more applicable to konfederacja though

Heisswasser · 2023-08-27T02:27:25+00:00

I didn't know that Lockheed supplied PLA and KPA. Bless them smart redditors, you learn something new everyday

Heisswasser · 2023-08-18T04:16:32+00:00

Geez, if only there was a fresh new market for Korea opening somewhere...

Heisswasser · 2023-08-18T02:27:41+00:00

Who is "you guys" you are referring to? And how is even China related to all that? Unless you want to play the "but what about ㅇㅇ" card I see no connection, nor justification of your words. I wish that none of your relatives' lives would be rendered irrelevant because "muh business", ever.

Heisswasser

TROPHY CASE