ASIC Digital Physical Design Engineer

Job Title

ASIC Digital Physical Design Engineer

Role Summary

Implement physical design for advanced SoC/Wi‑Fi products, driving floorplanning, power implementation, place-and-route, timing closure, physical verification, and tape-out. Work within the BU Wi‑Fi - SoC Group across Bristol, Stockholm, and Tampere and collaborate with architecture, design, verification, and silicon teams.

Contribute to automation, methodology improvements and AI-assisted design practices to improve implementation quality and productivity.

Experience Level

Mid-level / Experienced - several years of chip implementation experience expected.

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include:

• Perform floorplanning, macro placement, partitioning and voltage-area definition.
• Design and implement robust power distribution networks.
• Execute place & route flows including clock tree synthesis, congestion reduction, signal integrity and timing closure.
• Perform physical verification and signoff to meet foundry requirements and support tape-out.
• Analyze and mitigate power-integrity issues (IR-drop, electromigration) and reliability concerns.
• Drive ECOs and late-stage optimizations while meeting timing and schedule targets.
• Support silicon bring-up and debug physical implementation issues.
• Develop and improve physical design flows, automation scripts, and AI-assisted tooling.

Requirements

Must-have skills and experience:

• Several years of hands-on chip implementation experience (place & route, timing closure, signoff).
• Practical experience with Synopsys and Cadence implementation and signoff tools.
• Scripting skills (TCL, Perl, Python or similar) for flow automation and tooling.
• Experience using AI-assisted tools or AI-driven EDA flows to improve productivity.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience contributing to flow development and setup.
• Prior involvement in low-power SoC design, silicon bring-up or tape-out campaigns.

Education Requirements

BSc or MSc in Electronics Engineering or a similar technical field (e.g., Electrical/Computer Engineering) as stated in the posting.

About the Company

Company: Nordic Semiconductor

Headquarters: Trondheim, Norway

Norwegian fabless semiconductor company that designs low-power wireless connectivity solutions and system-on-chips (SoCs) for IoT, including Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, Zigbee, LTE-M/NB-IoT, Wi‑Fi, and cloud services (nRF Cloud).