Personal Update

New beginnings.

This post is a personal update, and is not on brand with the regular deep technical content on this newsletter. If this does not interest you, please skip this post. I am writing this from Pondicherry, a coastal town in southern India with a rich French influence from the colonization years. I’m minutes away from warm beaches and I’d like to get back to my vacation quickly, but also pen down some thoughts from my big life change. So let’s do this.

Sunrise on the beach at Pondicherry, where I will be hiding away for the next few days. Source: My phone camera.

Without much ado, here’s my “big update.” After 15 years of working in professional semiconductor companies, I’ve decided to strike out on my own. My focus will be around researching and writing about semiconductors on Substack, building out the Semi Doped podcast, and expanding into consulting. That’s the grand plan at least.

Why the big change?

Having worked at small, medium, and large companies, I’ve realized that there is so much more to the world of semiconductors than I’m privy to, compared to my daily duties on the job. I started this newsletter in 2024 to explore my curiosity and find out what else is out there; to give myself an opportunity to learn and explore technology on my own, without concern for whether it results in career advancement.

Even with many years of work experience, I realized how little I knew about how the industry works. Every piece of technology has vast technical depth and nuances that are humbling, and many times I only scrape the surface of what lies beneath. Staring into the abyss of the unknown excites me more than it intimidates me. Today, my content channels are merely a way for me to explore that technological abyss and see what lurks beneath the surface.

I often relate to my PhD years as my best years but I never stopped to question why. Most people speak of it in tortured terms, but I’ve always looked back fondly at it. I did well too, by any conventional metric. I graduated with well over a dozen journal and conference papers to my name, including an award at an international IEEE conference. This, I naively mistook for intelligence - as if, somehow writing more papers makes me smarter. My fresh academic brain knew no better.

For a while, I considered getting into academia. I even applied to universities. My wife maintains to this day that I am an excellent teacher; I did the impossible by teaching her mathematics for her GRE. But I had seen the seedy underbelly of university life in my PhD years and it wasn’t something I was eager to jump into. Industry was the obvious alternative for someone with an engineering degree like me. I entered the workforce in 2011 and it was not the best of times (perhaps it was the worst - for some). I had applied to 77 jobs, got 3 callbacks, and 2 offers. I picked the job in California since the pay was more. The “spray and pray” approach worked for me luckily.

Ever since then, I have genuinely had a lot of fun in the industry for well over a decade, and have met a lot of smart people along the way. At some point, it became clear to me that it was always going to be the “same thing, different place.” Nobody tells you how hard it is to change course once you have experience in a certain thing. You’re stuck doing the same thing forever, even if you don’t like it anymore, because you’re the expert now. Some people do however change roles with chameleon-like versatility. I never figured out how.

I was lucky in a sense. My best professional years were dead centered around the wireless explosion. My skills were perfectly aligned for the 2010s even though everyone told me a decade before that doing electromagnetics for a living was a poor professional choice. When I joined my last employer, 5G was a matter of national concern. In the last 3 years however, the semiconductor industry has been … different.

The birth of transformers has led a semiconductor renaissance that I never imagined I would see in my lifetime. The last time semiconductors were this sexy were in the 1970s, when Robert Dennard taught us how to scale transistors. In the modern era, my skills started to seem dated, from a time gone by. I have started to believe that wireless technology is largely a solved problem today. The world of artificial intelligence however, appears ripe with opportunity. The highest agency action I could undertake was to just learn everything about it I could. Not for a job change, not to convince someone, but for the sole reason that it was cool.

Substack was the perfect motivator. I had to learn something new to write every week - a cadence that I have largely kept up since the birth of my Substack in Jan 2024. As I kept churning out articles, it struck me. The reason I enjoyed my PhD was because I expressed complicated technical knowledge in simple words. My language in papers was not particularly stuffy, and my guess is that reviewers found my papers easy to read. Nearly every paper I wrote was accepted with minimal objections. Perhaps complex technical ideas, curiosity, and language were my Ikigai somehow. An odd combination, but it only makes sense in hindsight.

Today, I work more than I ever have. But it comes from a place of happiness - of doing what I truly enjoy. Through my writing, I have made so many connections with people that were never possible before. The commonly touted mantra of “writing makes your life better” is actually true. I recommend everyone to try some form of it.

With the support of all my paid subscribers, the newsletter income has grown to a point where I can support my lifestyle by writing on Substack – to where I can say I have “enough” to continue doing this full-time and hopefully have a lot of fun along the way. Thank you to everyone who supports this publication.

It’s all about figuring out one thing at a time. I have location and time freedom to a large extent now – which I fully appreciate. Being my own boss is liberating, but also scary. You stop working, you stop getting paid. I am also hoping that the Substack will continue to grow.

The Semi Doped podcast with Austin Lyons has been a fun endeavor, and we plan to grow out this channel with sponsorships and such. The newly-minted Semi Doped substack is an extension of the podcast – quick hits on the semi industry, without the depth. We want to grow it to be the Morning Brew, or 1440, of semis. Free to read, but sponsor driven. Reach out to us if you’re interested in sponsoring the Semi Doped newsletter or podcast.

Finally, I’m slowly building out SemiExponent – the consulting arm of my semiconductor work as well. If you would like to work with me, feel free to reach out to me at vik (at) semiexponent (dot) com.

Regular programming for ViksNewsletter will resume next week. Paid subscriptions have been paused, but you can still sign up for the free tier. Everything will resume as normal from April 30th.

Till then, I’m off to the beach!