So is there such a thing as a DSP engineer nowadays? [closed]

Question

I just read the article linked to below:

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1275520

Now, I'm planning on doing a Masters in Signal Processing. I'd like to know what the career prospects are for someone graduating in this specialization. Note that I live in the high-tech capital of India, so I should be in about the best place in this part of the world for any tech related positions.

I really like the idea of applying mathematics to solve practical problems, so that's why I picked DSP. Am I too late to the party, as this article seems to imply?

Answer 1

Yes there is. There definetely is there such a thing called DSP Engineer, but it is not exactly what the article described, i think it even goes more high level.

Nowadays, most companies relies on already established Knowledge such as standards, or papers from IEEE or AES, or such places. So a DSP engineer requires now more than ever, a lot of knowledge about Programming, in a low level fashion, programming in Assemly, C/C++ to producte robust, reliable, mantainable, understandable and expandable code. It is true what the artcile says that the are cookbooks, so if you don't remember exactly how LMS algorithm goes, you can pick up the book and refresh it in 5 minutes. But the concept needs to be there. If you are completely new to DSP, but you know a lot about programming and Kernel and operating systems, you will have a hard time implementing algorithms if you don't know the basics.

There is no real answer to your question but i state again my first comment. Yes there is, but it has incorporated a lot more about embedded Systems that what it had bewteen 1960 and 1980.

Answer 2

Seems to me that the DSP position goes the same way as most jobs in large corporations. Join a big enough company and you will specialize yourself because for the other things there is a guy who specialized in there and is much better at it than you. So you either do the higher-level (architecture, system design) or the lower-level (implementation, verifiction) tasks.

If you want to be more of a generalist, join a small start-up. It can easily happen that you do everything there: from high-level definition of a solution to a problem (probably on whiteboard), first implementation in high-level languages such as matlab all the way down to the FPGA implementation. However, as the startup grows, you probably will have to specialize, again. But by then you should know what parts you really like.