LIAM MADDEN CORPORATE VICE_PRESIDENT XILINX CORPORATION SAN JOSE:"I WAS a confirmed fiddler in secondary school," says Liam Madden of his early leaning towards gadgetry. "I terrorised my family with the things I built as a child."
Now a corporate vice-president of development with Silicon Valley-based semiconductor company Xilinx, all the fiddling seems to have paid off.
Madden studied engineering at UCD. While he says the course was more theory than the hands-on tinkering he preferred, he graduated with first-class honours. It was 1981 and with an interest in digital chip design, a field more advanced in the US that in Europe, Madden signed up for a master’s programme at the Ivy League Cornell University. He says his emigration wasn’t forced, however: “It wasn’t quite as bad in ’81, I think it got a little worse later, it was still a choice at that point”.
So did campus life in New York differ much from that in Dublin?
“Hugely. I think the Irish university system favoured those with sponge-like brains who could absorb vast amounts of information and regurgitate it back in a month or so,” says Madden. “In the US, it was far more focused on continuous assessment, which is probably the way Irish universities are now. In the good old days, it was possible to enjoy yourself for a reasonable fraction of the year and still come through at the end,” jokes the Waterford man.
Cornell even had its own microchip fabrication facility. Madden was in chip heaven. After graduation, a 12-year stint with Digital Equipment Corporation in California saw him work as lead designer on some of the fastest microprocessors of the decade.
Although Digital had significant operations in Ireland at the time and Madden was tasked with boot-camping the European sales force in how the products worked, he never got to visit the Galway plant.
“The only connection was this great guy who used to send out an e-mail newsletter called the Irish Emigrant, long before the internet was a big thing,” says Madden. “We’d all wait anxiously to get the updates on what was happening in the industry back home.
In 1996, Madden joined MIPS, a Silicon Valley-based tech company at the core of Nintendo games. Was gaming feted as the next big thing at the time? “There was a sense of it being a growth area, although in the Nintendo era of the mid-1990s it was still very much focused on kids’ games,” he recalls.
“I think we realised there was an insatiable appetite for games but also for the computing that was required to do that.”
After seven years, Madden jumped ship to neighbouring Microsoft, managing a team tasked with developing and reducing the cost of chips used in the Xbox 360. While Madden enjoyed his time with the software giant, he says “it was a software company and I was a hardware designer in a software company.
“Xbox was on the loss side of things at the time so it was a little bit of the poor relation, but it was also true that Bill Gates had realised there was a limit to how far you could push the PC once you had sold one to everyone in the world. They knew they had to broaden their portfolio.”
Madden’s next move was to microprocessor maker AMD, a company that had about 10 per cent of a chip market dominated by Intel.
“After working for Microsoft, I wanted to work for an underdog,” he says, but by then, starting to feel that microprocessors “were getting a little boring”, he moved to his current role with Xilinx in 2008.
After 27 years in the industry, he has seen huge change. “When I started, you could count the members in a chip team on your fingers, now you’ll have thousands of people working on one microprocessor.”
The tools have changed too, he recalls. “In the early 1980s, we used blueprints for drawing these things, now it’s all computer-aided design.”
Madden describes the chips whose design he oversees at Xilinx as chameleon devices: “You can load in one personality and it could act as a graphics chip or another and it can be an audio chip or a microprocessor computer – that was fascinating to me.
“The cost of developing new chips is north of $18 million so the ability to change the type of device you’re working with on the fly seemed to me the way of the future.”
The company’s customers range from the big telcos like Cisco and Ericsson to “a couple of guys in a garage who’ve decided they want to build some novel piece of hardware”. In fact, you’ll find Xilinx chips in everything from 3D TVs to multi-media systems in cars, avionics and aerospace equipment and even the new Kindle reader, he says.
Leading more than 450 engineers at sites in Silicon Valley, Canada, Colorado, Singapore, Hyderabad and Dublin, Madden spends a lot of time on planes, which is “the bane of my wife’s life”.
While Xilinx was burnt by the downturn, with more than a quarter of the company’s Dublin staff facing redundancy in 2009, things are now picking up, he say.
“What’s amazed me has been the pick-up in the industry – in Taiwan in January 2009, it seemed the lights were out in half the manufacturing facilities. A year later, they were oversubscribed and couldn’t turn out enough material . . . the bounce back has been so incredibly fast this time.”
Xilinx in Dublin is hiring again too and the key driver of growth, according to Madden, is wireless infrastructure such as that behind the iPad or iPhone. “We expect that to continue. The desire for people to communicate is pretty limitless, as far as we can see.”
To budding engineers wanting to follow in his footsteps, he advises knuckling down.
“The thing that stood to me most was a lot of the theoretical work taught at UCD at the time . . . that’s the one thing that never goes out of fashion. If I look back over 30 years, there has been radical changes in technology but the underlying physics stayed the same. Get a good grounding in the fundamentals, that’s the key thing in the end.”
