PD Intern

Job Title

PD Intern

Role Summary

As a Physical Design intern you will implement front-end designs into silicon, develop and run physical-design flows, automate design checks, and advise RTL decisions to accelerate iterations to signoff. You will work on inference-focused SoC blocks within a small, in-person engineering team in San Jose (Santana Row).

This is a 12-week paid, in-person internship based in San Jose, CA; benefits include generous housing support for relocators and daily office meals. Questions: internships@etched.com

Experience Level

Entry-level internship; intended for current students. (Recruiting for Fall '26, Spring '27, and Summer '27 interns.)

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include implementing designs in silicon and supporting physical design flows:

• Realize front-end RTL designs into silicon and support iterations to signoff.
• Develop and run physical-design (PD) flows to synthesize blocks and perform place-and-route checks.
• Automate final design checks and build scripts/tools to improve turnaround time.
• Advise RTL design decisions for timing, clocking, and physical constraints.
• Collaborate with verification and RTL teams to ensure design correctness and testability.

Requirements

Must-have technical background and skills:

• Familiarity with high-speed digital logic and ASIC/SoC design concepts.
• Experience with SystemVerilog, UVM, or Python; familiarity with verification and writing testbenches.
• Familiarity with physical-design flows and PD tooling.
• Ability to learn quickly about transformer architectures and modern AI inference workloads.

Nice-to-have:

• Exposure to modern ML/LLM architectures.
• Experience with numerical representations and RTL-level functions.
• Knowledge of clocking and reset schemes and timing closure.
• UVM or formal verification experience; scripting in Python or similar.

Education Requirements

Progress toward a Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field (currently enrolled students preferred).

About the Company

Company: Etched

Headquarters: San Jose, CA, United States

Etched develops purpose-built AI inference ASICs and systems optimized for transformer models, aiming to deliver significantly higher performance, lower cost, and lower latency than GPUs. The company focuses on enabling applications like real-time video generation and advanced reasoning agents, and is backed by leading investors and engineers.