Senior / Lead SoC Emulation Engineer

Job Title

Senior / Lead SoC Emulation Engineer

Role Summary

Lead pre-silicon emulation bring-up, execution, and debug for automotive SoCs using industry emulation platforms (Mentor/Siemens VELOCE, Synopsys ZEBU, Cadence Palladium). Work closely with RTL, verification, firmware and system teams to validate boot flows, peripherals, power modes, and safety scenarios on emulation hardware.

The role provides technical leadership and mentoring across emulation activities and enables pre-silicon software execution and low-power validation on complex ARM-based MCU/SoC designs.

Experience Level

Senior / Staff-level. Preferred 5–10 years' experience; the posting also lists 3–6 years of hands-on SoC emulation experience on relevant platforms.

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include emulation platform bring-up, enabling software flows, and validating system-level behavior on emulation hardware.

• Lead SoC-level emulation bring-up, execution, and debug on VELOCE, ZEBU, and Palladium platforms.
• Create and optimize emulation builds: configuration, partitioning, and performance tuning for complex automotive SoCs.
• Enable and debug pre-silicon software using JTAG/SWD and debuggers (e.g., LTB).
• Execute application-specific use cases including boot flows, peripherals, power modes, and safety scenarios on emulation builds.
• Drive low-power validation and debug, including power-up/power-down sequences.
• Debug and validate clock and reset architectures, clock gating, and cross-domain interactions.
• Enable and debug multi-core ARM boot flows, core bring-up, synchronization, and hand-off sequences.
• Collaborate with RTL, SoC verification, firmware, system, and IP teams; provide technical leadership and mentoring.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and experience for successful execution of the role.

• Must-have: Hands-on SoC emulation experience with Synopsys ZEBU, Mentor/Siemens VELOCE, and/or Cadence Palladium.
• Must-have: Proven experience in emulation build generation, bring-up, and execution; ability to execute and debug realistic software/application workloads on emulation.
• Must-have: Debugging experience using JTAG/SWD and LTB or similar debuggers.
• Must-have: Experience with ARM-based automotive SoCs (Cortex-M7, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M0+, Cortex-R52) and multi-core boot concepts.
• Must-have: Solid understanding of clocking and reset architectures and low-power SoC/MCU architectures.
• Nice-to-have: SoC verification experience (UVM / simulation / regression debug).

Education Requirements

Not specified.

About the Company

Company: NXP Semiconductors

Headquarters: Nijmegen, Netherlands

NXP Semiconductors N.V. is a global semiconductor company that provides High Performance Mixed Signal and Standard Product solutions. With over 45,000 employees and operations in more than 35 countries, NXP is a leader in secure connectivity solutions for embedded applications, catering to automotive, industrial IoT, mobile, and communication infrastructure markets. The company is committed to innovation and sustainability, advancing a smarter, safer, and more sustainable world through technology.