Here I am advertising for a #job, asking people to come and work for me, and almost nobody here knows what we do. This is the story of a Saskatoon #yxe #sktech company that is now a critical part of every piece of advanced electronics in the world. @SolidoDesign
When people first started making computer chips (semiconductors), they could design the whole thing on paper. But Moore's Law, or the rate at which we can pack transistors (the tiniest elements of semiconductors) in a given area, made that quickly impossible.
Computer chips became so complex that to design the next version, we needed a computer. Now we need thousands of computers working for thousands of hours to design the next chip.

But when you design something, you still need to know if it's going to work.
So much like we use a flight simulator to make sure that someone knows how to pilot a plane, there are chip simulators to make sure that a computer chip works as designed before it gets built.

The problem is that as chips got more complex and transistors got smaller...
The challenge of actually making the suckers became equally complex and error-prone.

Initially, this wasn't a problem. You just threw a few out, the same way you threw out a screw that came of the assembly line that's threaded incorrectly.
But now chips are so costly to make (printing the first chip costs 10s of millions) that mistakes cost a lot of money. You want almost every chip to work and you never want a disaster where none of them work.

In fact, you need about 994/1000 or 3-sigma in a normal distribution.
But for each of those chips to work, you need the millions, billions, or trillions of transistors to work. So that 3-sigma rule is applied a lot.

In fact, it's so hard to apply that rule as frequently as it needs to be, that it's sometimes easier to just say...
"To be sure that this whole memory design that I'm making --where I bought some pieces from one company, made other pieces, and am now selling to a third company -- works, I should make sure the pieces that will be used over and over will work out to 6-sigma."

999,997/1,000,000
Now remember what I said about simulation? To actually make sure that your shiny new computer chip will work with all of those bits being used over and over (like those little grey 2x1 lego blocks), you need to simulate it at least 1 million times.
In fact, you need to do it billions of times to make sure that your answer wasn't just, by chance, incorrect.

And simulations take time.
So much time that, for a modern, advanced chip, if you simulated on every available computer in the world, it would take until the heat death of the universe before you'd know if your chip worked.

Enter a little scrappy Saskatoon company: Solido Design.
A few brilliant people (I'm not one of them), figured out a smart way to run only a few thousand simulations and PROVE that they'd run the right ones, the ones that told you whether or not you'd ship the next generation of iPhone or if you'd go out of business.
And that answer, turns out to be worth a lot of money.

So Solido, in 2017, was bought by @siemenssoftware.

And every single advanced computer, including the phone or computer you're using _right now_ was built using Solido technology.
There isn't a major consumer device in the world built in the last 5 years that hasn't been simulated at some point with Solido software. Phones, computers, cars, space ships, medical devices, data centres... all produced with the help of a #yxe #sktech company.
And this is important, because the big problems of the world: climate change, vaccine development, weather modeling, infrastructure development; these problems all require more computing power than we have. And we're helping in these efforts every day.
We're also figuring out how to solve the next problem in our field. The problem that nobody else has yet to solve, but that an amazing R&D team of computer scientists and engineers in Saskatoon, many of them @usask, @usask_engr and @CS_USASK graduates, will figure out.
My job, and the job I'm trying to fill, is to help the really brilliant people designing chips at companies like @intel, @Qualcomm, @nvidia, @Samsung, and many others. To help them use our complex software to solve hard problems involving engineering and math.
Using a software tool that's been using applied machine learning for longer than it was cool. And to help them every day.

And my team has a worldwide reputation for providing the _best_ service and support in the world. Bar none.
Almost every day we get a reply from somewhere in the world where they tell us that we're better than anybody at this job.

And my team tells me that this is the best company they've ever worked at. And I agree.
So come and work for the best team in the world at a fantastic employer on some of the most complex and interesting problems that exist with the world's most advanced software in the field at @siemenssoftware.

With me. In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. https://jobs.siemens.com/jobs/227443 
If you want to know a bit more about how the job works, you can read this thing: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-application-engineering-aaron-genest/

I also LOVE to talk. So feel free to ask!
You can follow @AaronGenest.
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