Senior Physical Design Engineer (Tapeouts & Equity)

Job Title

Senior Physical Design Engineer (Tapeouts & Equity)

Role Summary

Lead full-chip physical implementations at a semiconductor startup in Sunnyvale, driving performance, power, and area (PPA) targets through to tapeout. The role requires hands-on debugging, ownership of implementation flows, and close collaboration with RTL, verification, and signoff teams.

Experience Level

Senior-level — 8–12 years of ASIC physical design experience, including full-chip implementation and tapeouts.

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include:

• Lead full-chip and large-block physical implementation from floorplanning through final routing and signoff.
• Implement placement, clock tree synthesis, routing, ECOs and timing closure to meet PPA targets.
• Perform hands-on debugging and root-cause analysis of timing, congestion, signal integrity, and DRC/LVS issues.
• Drive tapeout readiness activities and coordinate with validation, signoff, and foundry flows.
• Collaborate with RTL, synthesis, verification and EDA teams to optimize design for manufacturability and performance.
• Mentor junior engineers and improve physical design processes and tool flows.

Requirements

Must-haves:

• 8–12 years of ASIC physical design experience with full-chip or large-block implementations.
• Strong hands-on experience with Synopsys ICC2 and Cadence Innovus.
• Proven tapeout experience and ownership of implementation flows to signoff.
• Practical skills in timing closure, PPA optimization, ECO implementation, and debugging implementation issues.
• Experience coordinating with RTL, verification, signoff, and foundry/DFT teams.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with advanced process nodes and signoff tool flows.
• Scripting experience for flow automation (Tcl/Python/etc.).

Education Requirements

Not specified.

About the Company

Company: NewsNowGh

NewsNowGh appears to be a news/job aggregator that reposted this listing. The actual hiring employer (an Austin, Texas-based semiconductor/tech company) is not identified in the posting.