"Cadence Voltus Power Integrity Engineer Jobs: Browse PI Roles"

Power integrity engineer checking a chip power grid
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Power integrity used to be a late checkbox. On a modern digital SoC it is a signoff gate that can hold a tapeout, and Cadence Voltus power integrity engineer jobs go to the specialists who own that gate. They run full-chip IR-drop and electromigration analysis and decide whether the power delivery network is clean enough to ship.

Voltus IC Power Integrity is Cadence's platform for static and dynamic IR-drop, EM checking, and dynamic power simulation on digital designs. It reads the routed database, the power grid, and the switching activity, then flags where the grid breaks IR-drop, EM, or reliability limits. In practice you run it two ways.

During place and route it plugs into Innovus through the Integrated Signoff Flow, so you can catch a weak power rail and add straps or vias before routing locks down. After routing you run it as final signoff, feeding activity from VCD or FSDB into the grid and reading back where the supply droops past budget. The daily work is building the analysis setup, reading PDN reliability reports, and telling the physical design team which region needs more metal.

If you are scoping the wider field, the broader power integrity engineer jobs and power analysis engineer jobs categories list roles that use other signoff tools alongside Voltus.

Teams building large digital SoCs keep this signoff in-house. GPU and CPU groups at Nvidia and AMD, mobile and modem silicon at Qualcomm and Apple, and networking and storage controllers at Broadcom and Marvell all carry dedicated PI headcount. Many of them sit on Cadence implementation flows, where Voltus is the tool inside Innovus; teams on mixed-vendor or 3D-IC flows more often run Ansys RedHawk for the same job. AI accelerator startups hire here too, because a power grid mistake on a reticle-sized die is expensive to respin.

Compensation tracks the responsibility. In the US, base pay for power integrity and signoff engineers generally runs about $130K to $180K, and staff-level total compensation can push past $250K at large fabless companies. Our salary guide breaks the numbers down by level.

Save a search for Cadence Voltus power integrity engineer jobs on semidesignjobs.com and you will get an email when a matching role opens, from a signoff seat on a hyperscaler silicon team to a first PI hire at a startup.

FAQ

How does Cadence Voltus perform dynamic IR-drop analysis?

Voltus builds gate-level or transistor-level current profiles from switching activity (VCD or FSDB) or from vectorless estimation. It maps those currents onto the power grid netlist and runs a time-domain simulation, computing the instantaneous supply voltage at every node. Nodes where the transient droop exceeds the voltage-drop budget get flagged for grid fixes.

What is the Voltus and Innovus integration workflow for in-design power analysis?

Voltus plugs into Innovus through the Cadence Integrated Signoff Flow, so you can run IR-drop analysis inside the place-and-route environment while the power grid is still being built. That lets you refine the grid as you go, adding rails, adjusting via counts, and reallocating metal layers before routing is locked. Catching weak spots early keeps late power violations off the critical path.

How does Cadence Voltus handle multi-voltage domain IR-drop analysis?

Voltus runs hierarchical multi-voltage analysis, modeling each power domain's PDN and supply network on its own. It captures how level shifters, isolation cells, and power switches add to supply drops. That matters on designs with aggressive power management, where many independent rails sit at different voltages and a single shared analysis would hide domain-specific droop.