Emulation and Design Verification Engineer
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The job description
Tech stack. Cadence Palladium, Synopsys Zebu, emulation compile flows, SystemVerilog/UVM, SCE-MI transactors, in-circuit emulation, hybrid emulation
About the role
You will run design verification on hardware emulation platforms at a semiconductor company building chips too large to verify by simulation alone. You will compile multi-million-gate designs onto Palladium or Zebu systems, build transactor-based test environments, and execute the long software-driven scenarios that find system-level bugs months before silicon. You bridge two worlds: RTL designers who need fast, deep debug and software teams who need a working chip months early, and both depend on your platform staying productive.
What you will achieve
- Deliver emulation builds of the full design or major subsystems with compile turnaround under 48 hours, keeping the platform productive across RTL drops.
- Drive emulation regression suites (boot, OS bring-up, long stress scenarios) to stable, repeatable pass rates, triaging failures to RTL, model, or environment causes within a day.
- Ship transactor-based verification environments that run real firmware and driver code against the DUT at megahertz speeds, covering scenarios simulation cannot reach in reasonable time.
- Cut time-to-first-bug by establishing debug flows (waveform capture, signal forcing, checkpoint and restore) that let designers debug emulation failures as efficiently as simulation failures.
- Reduce program risk by partnering with RTL designers on emulation-specific design requirements (clocking, asynchronous interfaces, memory modeling) early in the design phase, before they become compile blockers.
What you will bring
Must-haves
- 2 to 5 years of ASIC verification experience with hands-on use of at least one emulation platform (Palladium, Zebu, or Veloce).
- Strong SystemVerilog skills and working knowledge of UVM, adapted to emulation-friendly coding styles that compile and run efficiently.
- Understanding of emulation compile flows: partitioning, synthesis for emulation, clock handling, and resource utilization trade-offs.
- Experience with transactors or SCE-MI interfaces connecting testbenches to the emulated DUT.
- Debug skills spanning RTL waveforms and software-driven scenarios, with the patience for long, complex failure analysis.
- Collaborative approach with both hardware designers and embedded software engineers, translating between their needs.
- Operational discipline: you manage compile queues, platform scheduling, and environment versioning so the team is never blocked.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with hybrid emulation (virtual platforms coupled to RTL) or in-circuit emulation with real peripherals.
- Familiarity with power estimation or performance analysis on emulation.
- Knowledge of emulation capacity planning and multi-user scheduling.
- Exposure to post-silicon or software bring-up flows that reuse emulation infrastructure.
NVIDIA
Qualcomm
AMD
Broadcom
Synopsys
Cadence