Hardware Design Salary and Insights for 2025

How do you get a job in hardware design?

Internships

Land the best-paying internship you can find, even in hardware design – anything FPGA and RTL work, if possible. You might have to settle for general internships. They won’t pay great, and the work itself will often be mundane, but it gets your resume inflated and skilled you up for rock-bottom prices.

Learning Resources

Learn to write code in Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) like VHDL or Verilog with tools such as GHDL and Icarus Verilog, and join communities such as FPGA for learning opportunities and peer advice; practical matters are easier to find help with than the philosophical ones. Get some hardware of your own. Lattice sells good development kits for beginner FPGAs; Xilinx and Intel have more powerful offerings for those ready to harness the power of supercomputers in tiny packages.

Educational Materials

Drill down into the theory behind it all with textbooks such as Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (2013) – a book that walks you through the design of the systems – and Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface (sixth edition, 2005) – an equally excellent introduction to understanding how systems work.

Professional Landscape

Things can vary, but sometimes you might work on one element of the project from start to finish – say a PCB layout or a schematic – depending upon what size the company is and what industry you are working in. Smaller teams will require more responsibilities, from maintaining customer contact to gaining the necessary certifications.

This is especially true as hardware design increasingly comes into conflict with software/IT, as great benefit accrues from programming (particularly Python) skills, in order to improve hardware function, debug issues, and analyse data.