Sibeam Group Interview Report

Interviewer: Okay Chris, thanks. One of the things that I heard mostly about SiBEAM, and I only had a chance to meet one of the founders when you guys were still in the old office, right at the integration was being announced. It was very early on and the purpose of that was to just find out about what this Silicon Image culture and it quickly became apparent within Silicon Image, their siting culture, and so now we are fast forwarding two years, and now it is Silicon Image, in Lattice and SiBEAM within this new big merged company.

Chris: Yeah.

Interviewer: James was giving me the update on what has been happening generally in the group, but one of my curiosity’s has been the culture of the SiBEAM group.. Like, both then and now. How long have you been with SiBEAM?

Chris: I didn’t actually join SIBEAM, I joined Silicon Image. I joined four years ago, primarily to be responsible for …show more content…
I would say, I think, if you look, there is some resentment of SiBEAM in Silicon Image, because SIBEAM did make much money and to fund SiBEAM there was headcount losses on the Silicon Image side. Just from a cultural perspective, I has always found the SiBEAM guys are much more willing to help each other than the Silicon Image guys are. A good example, when you are writing software for the chip, you really rely on the chip designers to tell you how the chip works, and it is often obvious they often do a poor job of documenting what they have done.

So, in SiBEAM it is really easy to get a design engineer to sit next to you and work with you to understand how the chip should be programed. Within Silicon Image it was a lot more difficult and I think the Silicone Image design guys felt software guys were not doing enough on their own. There is a long history of poor software engineers as