Physical Implementation Engineer

As an Arm Physical Design Methodology Engineer, you will be part of a team building innovative integration techniques that are both power efficient and high performance. Our team has a diverse set of engineers working across five design centers globally, servicing both internal and external partners around the world. The role combines broad physical design skills with extensive scripting covering all aspects of PD flows from RTL to GDS. We support all major EDA flows across a spectrum of foundry technologies.

You will have the opportunity to develop new physical design techniques and build on our modular integration PD framework. A key element of this role is interfacing directly with IP architects who build Arm design benchmarks as part of the physical design technology bring-up. You will have the opportunity to explore the latest process technologies, enhancing their strengths and mitigating weaknesses, while interacting with some of the industry’s leading experts in deep submicron circuit design, physical design, and design-for-manufacturing techniques.

We have a friendly and high-performance working environment, where Arm offers a competitive benefits package in France including: private medical insurance (employee and family) 25 days annual leave, 20 day sabbatical every four years, supplementary pension and reduction in working hours (11 days)

Skills and Accountabilities

• Developing new and improved physical design techniques through innovative scripts, checkers, flows and other automation to simplify the design process.
• Support internal and external partners to quickly setup and complete their designs
• Ability to analyze and interpret physical design implementation results and identify issues with the physical IP, process technology, and/or EDA tool.
• Ability to learn about Arm core and graphical micro-architecture and how that relates to power, performance, area, and yield.
• Understand or have an ability to learn a wide variety of industry standard modeling formats including Liberty, Verilog, LEF,UPF, NDM, SPICE, and CDL.
• Collaborate with teams across Arm to perform root-cause analysis of issues and develop innovative solutions.

Requirements

• A BS or MS degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering or other relevant technical fields.
• 6+ years of relevant design experience (for BSEE)
• 4+ years of relevant design experience (for MSEE)
• Significant experience taping out production silicon with a focus on floor planning and signoff.
• Knowledge of industry standard software for synthesis, automated place and route, EM-IR, timing analysis, and their associated programming languages and algorithms
• Strong scripting skills (Perl, TCL or equivalent)
• Examples of innovative, algorithmic problem solving
• Be willing to improve flows through iteration and repeated attempts to solve difficult problems

Desirable Skills & Experience

• Strong understanding of the algorithms used by EDA tools
• Familiarity with layout at the transistor level
• An understanding of semiconductor fabrication technology
• Detailed understanding of the impact of intelligent power design on physical design and current techniques for power management