Right now I’ll hire someone with a bachelor’s and pay their grad school tuition if they do well at an internship. A good IC designer takes a couple of years to grow no matter what degree or school they come from. I don’t want a simulation jockey, I need people who know the how’s and why’s of both the semiconductor devices and the end applications. I’m not going to spend $1M+ and 9 months of team time on a tapeout because someone didn’t question a result that looked to good to be true and didn’t know any better than to trust a buggy PDK. Semiconductor design is all about combining statistics, physics, communication theory, circuit design, system design, and pedantry. You practically have to be a lawyer to interpret a SiGe design guide.

Analog design as taught in undergraduate school is extremely incomplete. Most of it is aimed at embedded design or gluing together a series of opamps and making filters. Commercial discrete parts are really good nowadays, so most board level design doesn’t have to worry much about linearity, distortion, phase margin, transistor ft, resistor mismatch, or time delay. PCB design generally uses a few components with really good tolerances to build a circuit function. IC design uses a large quantity of crappy devices to build a stable circuit function. It’s an extra layer of methodology that isn’t there in undergrad, and it’s hard to learn on the job because the stakes are too high.