I'm curious what kind of engineering work they do on a day to day basis. Do they do PCB design mostly for cameras as independent modules that can be integrated into various consumer products? Do they work on flex cable design? #hardware
Hw engineers ? Sw engineers ? Thereās lots of work.. from designing the next gen image processors to supporting a wide range of sensors .. and lots of algorithms at user space .. on the software side itās all about performance and trying to get the captured frame from the sensor to the signal processor and down to other engines.
To clarify, .ostly curious from the hw side! Sounds like a lot of SoC RTL?
Thereās a few thousand people doing exclusively camera work across FW/HW/SW at Apple. Iām sure you can meet some of us my friend :) Mostly camera EE does the physical integration of the sensors and of course designs control systems. Definitely some people design flexes and the PCBs - but also we have pixel experts and actual sensor designers too. Many do FW for the HW, and then thereās all the camera SW folks in the camera app layer. Also whole teams of field and lab testers who ensure quality and test customer use cases.
Haha I need to get out of my bubble clearly! Thanks for a great answer! If I wanted to pivot from hardware engineer to camera engineer, should I work on some flex designs and also brush up my C?
Depends on what you want to do. Flex experience might be helpful but generally just look at the kinds of components in camera modules and see what kinds of experience you have that related there. AF VCM motor, CMOS sensors, physical design. FW is all in C for sure. Look at postings in camera hardware/ camera systems and Video Engineering and see what kinds of things theyāre looking for and talking about
What kind of HW engineering do you do OP ? Camera side of EE maybe more niche and minimal work if you're just going to create flexes and full module design. If you're going deeper into camera sensor design or something it'd be a major career change. I'm just an overall system/board designers which includes designing MLBs, flexes, overall system integration and architecture. The camera module is a smaller part of overall system. So comes down to what you really want to do and the scale of it.
I have heard the keyword ātuning ā