Jan. 10, 2003 — Although few are currently hiring, companies operating in the MEMS industry intend to hire new employees this year, according to a recent survey. Industry veterans say turnover is necessary for growth and compare it to the early years of semiconductors.
The survey, conducted by the MEMS Industry Group (MEMS IG) of Pittsburgh, solicited responses from 60 companies in MEMS, of which 42 responded. Only one company reported it would not be hiring one year from now and only two companies indicated fewer employees than they had a year ago. Five respondents indicated they are currently hiring. The survey did not include companies that have gone out of business and shed their entire work forces.
“The fact that all but one company indicated they’d be hiring in a year means that everyone is hopeful,” said Ellen McDevitt, director of member services at MEMS IG. “Since most of the companies surveyed are small, or are the small business units in larger companies, letting go of a few employees stands to significantly reduce staff, leaving a staff less prepared for the day the economy improves, so it seems companies are trying their best to stay in the game and not downsize.”
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One company currently hiring is Burbank, Calif., MEMS developer MEMGen Corp. “A lot of what we have … on our Web site are new positions,” said Vacit Arat, president and chief executive officer, who also said the company is experiencing ordinary industry turnover. Its chief technology officer, John Evans, and a few others have left the company to pursue other opportunities.
In addition to everyday turnover, a challenging economy and a tight funding climate have conspired to force some companies to restructure and lay off employees. Coventor Inc., a Cary, N.C., vendor of MEMS design software and affiliated services, cut its work force to about 50 employees from a height of more than 100 during the past year in addition to spinning off its biotech unit and putting its optical unit into hibernation, according to Prat Kumar, vice president of marketing.
Industry veterans say employee turnover is a necessary growing pain and that it may help fuel growth in MEMS in the same manner that the swapping of human resources helped drive the semiconductor industry forward.
“Everybody has tried to emulate what happened,” said Gene Burk, speaking of the semiconductor industry. Burk, currently sales manager for MEMS products for DALSA Semiconductor of Bromont, Quebec, worked on MEMS sensors at Honeywell International Inc. when the company first entered the field in the 1960s.
“What really caused Silicon Valley was a place called Walker’s Wagon Wheel,” Burk said. Near the facilities of Fairchild Semiconductor, Raytheon and National Semiconductor, it was the Friday night watering hole of the semiconductor set. Resumes would openly trade hands and employees would move from company to company.
Such turnover creates a more experienced and capable work force, according to MEMS consultant Bill Trimmer. “New people in this field make the same mistakes that us old people made years ago,” he said. “Your large-scale intuition doesn’t work on the small scale.” Trimmer worked on MEMS at Bell Labs in the 1980s.
And then there are the intangible benefits. Coventor’s Kumar said one employee recently went to a partner firm, a win-win for both companies and for the employee, who found a new job quickly.
However, MEMGen’s Arat maintains that the comparison to the semiconductor industry presumes a certain transferability of skills. “In semiconductors, the movement of people came largely as a result of … the ease of transferable skills,” he said. “In design, a generic IC engineer could design a CPU just as easily as an I/O chip just as easily as a graphics chip.”
In the MEMS industry, by contrast, “What I’ve seen so far is that there are several fundamentally different manufacturing technologies that are custom fit for different applications … There is no generic thing we can call a MEMS expert.”