HW SOC/ASIC Physical Design Engineer, Staff/Sr Staff

Job Posting Date

2025-10-17

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General Summary:

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Physical Design Engineer to join our team. The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience in RTL-to-GDSII flow, with a strong focus on Floor-planning, Clock Tree Synthesis, Place-n-Route (PnR), DRC and Timing closure. This role involves architecting and implementing robust, low-skew, power-efficient clock distribution networks tailored for a complex design to meet performance, power, and area goals.

This role requires full-time onsite work in San Diego, CA (5 days per week).

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Science, Engineering, or related field and 4+ years of ASIC design, verification, validation, integration, or related work experience.

OR

• Master's degree in Science, Engineering, or related field and 3+ years of ASIC design, verification, validation, integration, or related work experience.

OR

• PhD in Science, Engineering, or related field and 2+ years of ASIC design, verification, validation, integration, or related work experience.

Key Responsibilities:

• Execute floorplanning, placement, clock tree synthesis (CTS), and routing using industry-standard tools (e.g., Innovus, ICC2).
• Drive timing closure across multiple corners and modes using static timing analysis (STA) tools (e.g., PrimeTime).
• Collaborate with RTL designers to resolve timing, congestion, and DRC issues.
• Optimize design for power, performance, and area (PPA).
• Conduct formal equivalence checks between RTL and netlist.
• Support physical verification including DRC, LVS, and antenna checks.
• Work closely with backend teams for tapeout preparation and signoff.
• Excellent scripting skills (TCL, Python, Perl) for reference flow automation.
• Execute full-chip and block-level physical verification including DRC, LVS, ERC, antenna, and density checks using industry-standard tools (e.g., Calibre, Pegasus, ICV).
• Customize and optimize reference physical verification flows to align with project needs and foundry requirements.
• Perform GDS-to-GDS comparisons to validate ECO changes, ensure layout integrity, and support tapeout readiness.
• Debug and resolve physical verification violations, working closely with layout, design, and CAD teams.
• Collaborate with foundries to ensure compliance with latest design rule manuals (DRMs) and tapeout checklists.
• Support signoff verification, including multi-corner/multi-mode analysis and ECO validation.
• Develop and maintain automation scripts for verification flows, reporting, and regression testing.
• Interface with EDA vendors to resolve tool issues and improve flow robustness.
• Participate in design reviews, providing feedback on layout quality, rule compliance, and manufacturability.
• Ensure timely delivery of clean GDSII for tapeout, with full verification signoff.
• Perform full-chip and block-level static timing analysis (STA) using industry-standard tools (e.g., Synopsys PrimeTime, Cadence Tempus).
• Develop, validate, and maintain timing constraints (SDC) for multiple modes and corners.
• Collaborate with RTL, synthesis, and physical design teams to ensure timing-aware design practices.
• Debug and resolve setup, hold, and transition violations across various PVT corners.
• Drive timing closure through iterative optimization and ECO implementation.
• Customize and enhance timing analysis flows to improve accuracy, efficiency, and scalability.
• Analyze clock tree timing, including skew, latency, and jitter impacts.
• Support signoff timing verification, including cross-domain timing and false/multicycle path handling.
• Interface with EDA vendors to resolve tool issues and improve flow robustness.
• Participate in design reviews, providing insights on timing risks and mitigation strategies.
• Define and implement low-power architecture using CLP methodology across RTL and physical design stages.
• Develop and maintain power intent files (UPF/CPF) and ensure alignment with design specifications.
• Customize and optimize low-power reference flows to meet project-specific requirements.
• Collaborate with RTL, synthesis, and physical design teams to integrate power-aware features such as power gating, retention, isolation, and level shifting.
• Perform power-aware static checks, simulation, and formal verification to validate power intent.
• Debug and resolve issues related to power domain crossings, voltage islands, and power sequencing.
• Support signoff verification including power-aware LVS/DRC, STA, and EM/IR analysis.
• Interface with EDA vendors to resolve tool issues and improve low-power flow robustness.
• Participate in design reviews, providing insights on power architecture, risks, and mitigation strategies.
• Ensure compliance with foundry low-power guidelines and contribute to successful tapeout.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• 4+ years of experience in physical design, with a focus on clock tree design and implementation.
• Strong understanding of digital timing concepts, clock domain crossing, and synchronous/asynchronous design.
• Proficiency with EDA tools for CTS, STA, and physical verification (e.g., ICC2, Innovus, PrimeTime).
• Experience with advanced nodes (e.g., 7nm, 5nm, 3nm) and FinFET technologies.
• Solid scripting skills (TCL, Python, Perl) for flow automation and data analysis.
• Familiarity with low-power design techniques, including clock gating and multi-voltage domains.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with custom clock tree architectures such as H-tree, mesh, or spine-based topologies.
• Knowledge of EM/IR analysis, thermal-aware clocking, and reliability modeling.
• Exposure to high-speed interface clocking (e.g., SerDes, DDR, PCIe).
• Understanding of package-level clock planning and signal integrity.

Principal Duties & Responsibilities:

• Leverages advanced ASIC knowledge and experience to define, model, design (digital and/or analog), optimize, verify, validate, implement, and document IP (block/SoC) development for a variety of high performance, high quality, low power products.
• Creates advanced architectures, circuit specifications, logic designs, and/or system simulations based on system-level requirements.
• Collaborates across functional teams (e.g., software architecture, hardware architecture, product management, program management teams) to develop and execute an implementation strategy that meets system requirements and customer needs.
• Evaluates all aspects of complex process flow from high-level design to synthesis, place and route, timing and power use, and verification or similarly for custom circuit design/layout flow.
• Utilizes tools/applications (e.g., RTL to GDS Flow, Virtuoso) to execute and enable advanced architecture and design of multiple complex blocks/SoC or IC Packages.
• Writes and reviews detailed technical documentation for complex EDA/IP/ASIC projects.

Level of Responsibility:

• Works independently with minimal supervision.
• Provides supervision/guidance to other team members.
• Decision-making is significant in nature and affects work beyond immediate work group.
• Requires verbal and written communication skills to convey complex information. May require negotiation, influence, tact, etc.
• Has a moderate amount of influence over key organizational decisions (e.g., is consulted by senior leadership to make key decisions).
• Tasks do not have defined steps; planning, problem-solving, and prioritization must occur to complete the tasks effectively.