Quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED], on Fri 28 Dec 2007 07:14:23 PM PST: > <snip> >> >> There are companies that exist to sell platforms for development (like >> Spectrum Signal Processing, Nallatech, etc.) and their platforms are >> priced accordingly. A $15,000 hardware development platform isn't all >> that expensive in the context of a $100K seat license for all the FPGA >> tools which in turn is a reasonable expense in the context of $250k/yr >> engineers toiling on a $1B/yr in sales radio product. >> > <snip> > > $250K/yr radio development engineers?
$80-100K/yr salary + holiday/vacation/sick time+ benefits + office rent/heat/lights + overheads + taxes + etc. comes out pretty close to $200-250K/yr for a body sitting at a desk. What radio industry do you work in > and where do I sign-on? I've been a hiring engineering manager for many > years in west coast high-tech defense, semiconductor, cellular, and > commercial/military radio businesses, and have neither paid an engineer of > ANY experience level that kind of salary, nor has such a beast ever been > offered to me. End, fully burdened cost. I agree nobody is gettng that kind of salary. Or, if you like, look at contractor rates (which presumably roll all the stuff into one price) which are around $100/hr * 2000 hrs/yr = 200K (and you still pay for the heat and lights on top of that.) So.. if you're looking at a tool chain that costs, say, $40-50K/yr/seat, and it improves the productivity of an engineer by 20%, you're probably ahead of the game (except that, as we all know, engineer time is not fungible, nor can you hire partial engineers, and to boot, labor usually comes out of a different pot of money than hardware or software licenses). A 20% boost in productivity is pretty easy to come by, just by getting rid of tedious design rule checking and such. Say you use something like ADS instead of a spreadsheet to do your gain and noise budgets. ADS lets you run the cases over temperature and tolerance fairly easily, the excel spreadsheet does not. Or, more SDR related.. you can have someone use Matlab/Simulink or SPW and generate runnable code fairly quickly to check out the algorithm. If your application is low volume, it might even be a decent trade to spend more money on faster DSP hardware than on more engineer time to make it more efficient than what SPW or Simulink generates. Companies that plan to stay afloat for any length of time > don't normally offer up that kind of dough - at least not down here in San > Diego. > > Dan > _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
