Monday, March 10, 2008

Women to Watch

Ellen Piccioli: On the inside of chip making

By Keith Regan

As an engineering student at Cornell University, Ellen Piccioli visited Digital Equipment Corp. to see microprocessors designed and fabricated. At the time, she was exploring general engineering studies, but the visit and job shadowing helped put her on a path that has led to her being one of this region's most accomplished microprocessing engineering managers.

"I was just in awe of the whole process of design and development that enabled the creation of those chips," she says.

After graduation, Piccioli went to work for DEC, where she began her career on the manufacturing side of the chip industry and later worked at Hewlett-Packard Co., where she helped implement design and speed debug activities for HP's Alpha 21364 microprocessor.

As the industry consolidated, she found herself at Intel Corp., where today she is a senior engineering manager at Intel's Massachusetts Microelectronic Design Center (MMDC). She led the pre-silicon validation team on IPF and Xeon family chip projects and was also a cluster design and architecture manager for the first-ever design project conducted at the MMDC.

Piccioli particularly enjoys the camaraderie and teamwork in the cross-disciplinary work of developing new technologies and says she often calls on the lessons she learned playing field hockey and lacrosse in her professional work.

As she has risen through the ranks and moved from manufacturing to design, she has never felt limited in her career: "I've been impressed by every company I've worked at in how they welcome women," said Piccioli, 43.

Still, she knows that women aren't entering the field in the numbers they could be. At her alma mater, for instance, about 20 percent of incoming engineering students in 1980 were women. In 2007, that figure was just 28 percent.

"It has improved, but boy, I bet we could do better," she says.

Improving work-life balance is part of the answer. In chip design, Piccioli said time demands come with the territory -- especially as deadlines loom -- but believes flexibility within corporations and technology that lets people work from anyplace, anytime, are part of the solution.

In addition to staying involved with her alma mater in its efforts to encourage women to pursue engineering as a career, she also works with Intel in its efforts to generate interest in engineering among students in area schools.

Her own included a supportive guidance counselor who never discouraged her pursuit of engineering studies and an uncle who had a successful career in the field.

"Being a woman in the engineering field was never something I considered an obstacle," she says. "There was an awareness, but I never thought of it as a hurdle."