Synopsys Summer Internship 2021: Interdisciplinary Learning

As summer unfolds, a little over 130 students, myself included, have been interning for various Synopsys teams in North America. (Globally, the company has more than 600 interns.) Interns have been engaging in exciting, challenging, and meaningful work, with many activities offered to make the experience fun and well-rounded. For example, interns have been able to attend virtual events about AI, career development, and Synopsys corporate culture and participate in sessions like trivia night and even yoga.

Although I was apprehensive about the internship being remote, Synopsys has offered so much for me. I came into this internship as a marketing major from Tulane University with very little technical background, but with the support of my mentor and managers, I have a new understanding of the semiconductor industry and how important Synopsys technology is to everyday life. This summer I worked in the Enterprise Marketing and Communications Group, where I focused on public relations and social media. To summarize just a little, my projects this summer consisted of drafting social media posts for corporate blogs, reviewing contributed articles, and gathering and analyzing social media metrics from different platforms.

To provide additional insight about the Synopsys internship experience, I spoke with five other interns, all in different parts of the Synopsys organization, to learn what their internships have provided for them.

Engineering Key Technologies

Harsimrat Wadhawan just completed his third year at the University of Toronto, where he is studying electrical engineering. Wadhawan is a technical engineering intern with the Synopsys Solutions Group. This internship has allowed Wadhawan to apply techniques learned from class to his projects this summer. He has helped his team apply varied analyses via simulations that will determine the best design results. Also, Wadhawan has helped organize the team’s internal processes to maximize efficiencies. Wadhawan explains how exciting it is to be “learning something new every day and working with a team that is designing technology used in almost every device in the world.”

Modeling Flow Charts

Manit Dassani is going to be a senior at San Jose State University, where he is studying business administration with a concentration in accounting. As a finance intern, Dassani is working on various projects, assisting the finance director on workflow analysis including creating flow charts and gathering and evaluating key information. Dassani noted that the experience from his internship has been the best teacher. His advice to other students is to “always come prepared to meetings by taking notes since information is relayed so quickly and take the initiative by reaching out first.”

Enhancing Prediction and Correlation

Rubens Lacouture recently graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Northeastern University. This fall he will be starting his Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at Stanford University. Lacouture is an intern for the Synopsys Digital Design Group. He has been working on enhancing tools developed by Synopsys used for predicting certain properties of logic components in the design cycle and developing code that assesses the impact and performance of the enhancements. For one project he implemented a feature that compares and tests the impact of disabling virtual buffering as compared to enabling virtual buffering. After every code change, he would perform tests on various designs to verify that the code was functioning as intended. His current project involves working with computing delays, with a goal to implement an isolating feature that can assess a separate average for both a rise and fall delay. Lacouture says interning with Synopsys “definitely makes you feel like you are contributing to products of high impact and not just doing busy work.”

Minimizing Error with Machine Learning

Shiyi Jiang, a second-year Ph.D. student at Duke University, is interning with the Synopsys Verification Group this summer. Working mostly on the hardware side of chip designs, she has been using machine learning models to see if there are key features to determine the best place for macros. The goal is to have the models find the best results for the chip designs. A valuable part of the internship has been the ability to learn other things that are outside of her research at Duke, thereby expanding her skill set. She says Synopsys has “helped me think of the same problems from different perspectives.”