Senior Staff Digital Systems & Emulation Engineer

Job Description

Renesas is seeking an experienced Senior Staff Digital Systems & Emulation Engineer to develop and drive advanced pre-silicon emulation and digital system validation for next-generation power management products targeting AI, datacenter, and high-performance computing applications.

This role will focus on bridging system architecture, digital design, FPGA/emulation, control algorithms, and hardware validation, enabling complex digital power-management functions to be exercised and validated ahead of silicon availability.

The successful candidate will combine strong digital design fundamentals with hands-on FPGA and emulation expertise and a working knowledge of digital signal processing and control techniques. The engineer will work closely with System Architecture, Digital Design, Firmware, Design Verification, Analog/Mixed-Signal Design, Applications, and Validation teams to translate product requirements and algorithms into executable real-time prototypes.

The position is a senior individual-contributor role with significant technical ownership and influence on emulation architecture, methodology, and future development platforms.

Key Responsibilities

Emulation & FPGA Development

• Architect, develop, and maintain FPGA-based emulation platforms for advanced digital power controllers and mixed-signal power-management products.

• Map and integrate production or representative RTL into FPGA/emulation environments for pre-silicon feature development and validation.

• Develop reusable FPGA infrastructure, interfaces, test capabilities, and debug methodologies supporting multiple product generations.

• Develop and improve build, configuration, automation, and debug flows to make emulation environments accessible and repeatable across engineering teams.

• Support integration of FPGA/emulated controllers with real power stages, loads, instrumentation, and system-level hardware.

• Identify differences between ASIC and FPGA implementation and develop appropriate strategies to maintain meaningful system-level behavior and correlation.

Digital Systems & RTL

• Understand and contribute to digital system architecture, microarchitecture, and RTL implementation where required.

• Analyze timing, latency, clock-domain, interface, datapath, and real-time execution requirements relevant to system behavior.

• Develop or modify synthesizable RTL blocks required for emulation, instrumentation, prototyping, and architectural exploration.

• Support integration and debug of digital interfaces, ADC/DAC data paths, PWM generation, telemetry, protection functions, state machines, and embedded control logic.

• Work with Digital Design and Verification teams to correlate behavior between behavioral models, RTL simulation, emulation, and silicon.

DSP & Control Algorithm Implementation

• Support implementation and evaluation of digital control and signal-processing functions used within power-management systems.

• Translate mathematical or system-level algorithms into practical fixed-point and real-time digital implementations.

• Evaluate effects of sampling rate, latency, quantization, numerical precision, filtering, and computational architecture on system performance.

• Implement and evaluate digital filters, signal conditioning, control-loop functions, and related DSP algorithms where required.

• Collaborate with system architects to rapidly prototype new algorithms before committing them to production RTL.

System-Level Validation

• Develop system-level emulation scenarios representing realistic customer use cases and operating conditions.

• Define measurable pass/fail criteria and validation methodologies for new architectural features.

• Correlate emulation results with simulation, behavioral models, bench measurements, and silicon measurements where available.

• Support pre-silicon validation of control-loop behavior, transient response, telemetry, protection mechanisms, sequencing, communication interfaces, and other system-level functions.

• Perform detailed debug across hardware, RTL, firmware, and system boundaries to identify root causes of complex issues.

Methodology & Technical Leadership

• Define and improve methodologies for FPGA prototyping and emulation of mixed-signal and digitally controlled power systems.

• Develop reusable architectures, automation, scripts, and engineering workflows that reduce setup and debug time.

• Participate in architecture, design, and verification reviews and provide technical guidance on emulation feasibility and implementation trade-offs.

• Work independently on complex technical problems and drive issues to resolution across organizational boundaries.

• Mentor engineers in FPGA, digital design, emulation, and system-debug techniques.

• Document architecture, implementation, test methodology, limitations, and results to enable reuse across programs.

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related discipline.

• 10+ years of relevant industry experience in digital design, FPGA development, emulation, or related semiconductor development.

• Strong hands-on experience with FPGA architecture, implementation, integration, and debug.

• Strong knowledge of Verilog and/or SystemVerilog RTL design.

• Good understanding of digital design fundamentals including clocks, resets, CDC, state machines, datapaths, pipelining, timing, and hardware interfaces.

• Experience with FPGA synthesis, implementation, timing analysis, and hardware bring-up.

• Experience developing scripting and automation using Python, TCL, shell, or similar languages.

• Hands-on experience debugging complex interactions between RTL, firmware/software, and hardware.

• Ability to interpret system requirements and translate them into practical emulation and validation architectures.

• Strong technical documentation and communication skills.

• Demonstrated ability to work effectively across geographically distributed and cross-functional engineering teams.

Preferred

• Experience with semiconductor pre-silicon emulation or FPGA prototyping.

• Experience with major FPGA platforms and development environments.

• Knowledge of digital signal processing, including digital filters, fixed-point arithmetic, sampling, quantization, and signal-processing datapaths.

• Understanding of digital control systems and feedback-loop concepts.

• Experience with digital power management, multiphase voltage regulators, PMICs, or mixed-signal ICs.

• Familiarity with ADC/DAC interfaces, PWM generation, telemetry, high-speed digital interfaces, and real-time control systems.

• Experience correlating behavioral models, RTL simulations, FPGA/emulation results, and laboratory measurements.

• Familiarity with Python-based modeling, data analysis, and automated hardware validation.

• Experience developing reusable FPGA/emulation platforms supporting multiple products or development teams.

Key Attributes

The ideal candidate is a hands-on senior technical contributor who is comfortable moving between system concepts, algorithms, RTL, FPGA implementation, and laboratory hardware. The candidate should be able to take an architectural concept, determine how it can be emulated, implement the required infrastructure, demonstrate it operating in real time, and provide objective data that allows the engineering team to make product decisions.

Additional Information

Renesas is an embedded semiconductor solution provider driven by its Purpose, To Make Our Lives Easier . With a global team of over 21,000 engineers and problem solvers in more than 30 countries, we offer the opportunity to work on world‑leading technology for Automotive, Industrial, Infrastructure, and IoT, shaping a safer, healthier, greener, and smarter future.

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