Today is sort of opposite from yesterday. Even though I usually stay home on Wednesdays, I had to go to work today for an afternoon meeting with an old friend (whereas on Tuesdays, I’m usually at work, but stayed home yesterday). I did get a ton of layout work done at home right up to where I had to leave for the meeting.
I got to work in my yellow car just as my friend Todd rolled in. He hadn’t seen me in several years, but he recognized me from 20 yards away. The thing is, he didn’t know I was working for this company, so wasn’t expecting to see me, yet he still recognized me. He asked me if I worked in the building, and I told him that he was coming to see me! He said that he had looked for me at my former employer earlier today when he met with them, but couldn’t find me. He also didn’t recognize many of the people there.
The meeting went fine, and I think he will be able to help our company out in big ways. My boss and I went out for coffee after that to strategize about a potential process transfer. For the first time today, he mentioned that he’d like to get out of bipolar as a process and move exclusively to BiCMOS. I DO NOT want to get out of bipolar; the moment we do, I become far less useful to this company, at least in a layout capacity (fortunately, I can do many other things). Bipolar is also cheaper and works well in high power applications, which is why a lot of Power Management start-ups like us begin with bipolar. The more modern BiCMOS processes are more time-consuming to draw, they have 100x more rules, and the startup cost to manufacture is 10x more.