Low Power Analog Design Engineer

About the role

You will design ultra-low-power analog circuits at a semiconductor company, creating the always-on monitors, wake-up receivers, and micropower references that enable years of battery life in IoT, wearable, and remote sensing products. Low-power analog designers operate in the nano-ampere regime where every electron counts: their circuits must function correctly with minuscule bias currents while maintaining adequate speed, noise, and precision. You will design subthreshold circuits, nanopower references and oscillators, and power-gating interfaces that let the rest of the chip sleep while your circuits stand watch.

What you will achieve

• Design nanopower analog blocks including references, comparators, oscillators, and POR circuits operating reliably on nano-ampere to micro-ampere supply currents across the full temperature range.
• Optimize circuits for subthreshold and near-threshold operation, managing the exponential sensitivity to variation and temperature that defines this regime.
• Design always-on monitoring circuits including voltage supervisors, temperature sensors, and wake-up detectors with the reliability that safety-critical standby operation demands.
• Minimize leakage contributions through device selection, stack forcing, and power-gating-friendly design, quantifying standby power across PVT corners and operating modes.
• Verify ultra-low-power behavior including start-up sequencing, brown-out recovery, and cold-temperature operation where subthreshold circuits are most vulnerable.
• Validate micropower circuits on silicon with precision current measurements, characterizing quiescent consumption, wake-up behavior, and functional margins across the full temperature range.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 2 to 5 years of experience in low-power or ultra-low-power analog design with silicon results.
• Deep understanding of subthreshold device operation, weak inversion modeling, and its design implications.
• Strong fundamentals in precision analog design adapted to the constraints of nano-ampere biasing.
• Experience with start-up circuits, POR design, and the robustness challenges of micropower operation.
• Proficiency with Cadence tools including the simulation accuracy considerations critical at ultra-low currents.
• Bench measurement skills for nano-ampere current measurement and low-level signal characterization.
• Patience and rigor for a domain where simulation models are least accurate and silicon surprises most likely.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with energy harvesting interfaces or power management for micropower systems.
• Familiarity with biomedical implant or IoT edge applications and their power constraints.
• Knowledge of radiation effects on ultra-low-power circuits for harsh environments.
• Background in wake-up radio or event-driven sensing architectures.