Hardware validation – what it is and why it matters

Software and Hardware Validation has quickly become the critical gate to getting products out the door and into the market. However, most college curriculum's do not include courses in validation, and students are often unaware and unprepared for what validation in industry entails. Come hear more about hardware validation at Intel, including why it continues to be one of the most challenging, diverse, innovative and exciting careers at Intel, and how you can prepare yourself for a future job in validation.
Erin Wakefield joined Intel in June 2005 after graduating from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a BS in Computer Engineering. She began her career working in Oregon as a post-silicon validation engineer on Pentium 4, Xeon, and finally the Core i7 products. In late 2007, Erin left the post-silicon team to join the Larrabee (discrete graphics + throughput computing) silicon design team as a fullchip pre-silicon validator. On Larrabee Erin focused on DFx, cache coherency, and multi-processor validation. In early 2009 Erin took on a technical lead role for fullchip validation on Larrabee 1, and became a fullchip first-level manager for Larrabee 2 in late 2009. In June of 2010 Erin graduated with her Masters in Engineering and Technology Management from Portland State University.



Finally, in late 2010, Erin moved to the Digital Home Group's Media SV team in Chandler, AZ and is currently a first level manager for Encode, Decode, and Security on the Media System Validation team.