Senior Staff Digital Systems & Emulation Engineer

Job Title

Senior Staff Digital Systems & Emulation Engineer

Role Summary

Lead development of pre-silicon FPGA-based emulation and digital system validation for advanced power-management products targeting AI, datacenter, and high-performance computing. Work across system architecture, digital design, firmware, verification, analog/mixed-signal design, and validation to create real-time prototypes and validate control algorithms before silicon.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with technical ownership of emulation architecture, methodologies, and prototype platforms.

Experience Level

Senior role. The posting requests 10+ years of relevant industry experience in digital design, FPGA development, emulation, or related semiconductor development.

Responsibilities

Deliver and support FPGA/emulation platforms and system-level validation for digitally controlled power-management products.

• Architect, implement, and maintain FPGA-based emulation platforms and reusable infrastructure for pre-silicon validation.
• Map production or representative RTL into FPGA/emulation environments and manage differences between ASIC and FPGA implementations.
• Develop build, configuration, automation, and debug flows to make emulation repeatable across teams.
• Integrate emulated controllers with real power stages, loads, instrumentation, and system hardware for lab validation.
• Analyze timing, latency, clock-domain crossings, interfaces, and real-time execution constraints affecting system behavior.
• Develop or modify synthesizable RTL blocks for emulation, instrumentation, and architectural exploration.
• Implement and evaluate DSP and control algorithms in fixed-point, real-time FPGA implementations.
• Define system-level emulation scenarios, pass/fail criteria, and correlate emulation with simulation and lab measurements.
• Perform cross-domain debug across hardware, RTL, firmware, and systems to identify root causes.
• Provide technical leadership, produce documentation, and mentor engineers in FPGA, emulation, and system-debug techniques.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and experience; preferred items listed separately.

• Must-have: 10+ years relevant industry experience in digital design, FPGA development, emulation, or semiconductor development.
• Must-have: Hands-on experience with FPGA architecture, implementation, integration, hardware bring-up, synthesis, and timing analysis.
• Must-have: Strong Verilog and/or SystemVerilog RTL design skills and solid digital design fundamentals (clocks, resets, CDC, state machines, datapaths, pipelining).
• Must-have: Experience debugging interactions between RTL, firmware/software, and hardware; strong technical documentation and cross-team communication skills.
• Must-have: Experience with scripting and automation (Python, TCL, shell, or similar) to support build and validation flows.
• Nice-to-have: Pre-silicon emulation or FPGA prototyping for mixed-signal or power-management ICs; familiarity with major FPGA platforms and development environments.
• Nice-to-have: Knowledge of DSP concepts (filters, fixed-point arithmetic, sampling, quantization) and digital control systems.
• Nice-to-have: Experience with digital power management, multiphase regulators, PMICs, ADC/DAC interfaces, PWM generation, telemetry, and high-speed digital interfaces.
• Nice-to-have: Experience correlating behavioral models, RTL simulations, emulation results, and laboratory measurements; building reusable FPGA/emulation platforms.

Education Requirements

Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related discipline (as stated in the posting).

About the Company

Company: Renesas

Headquarters: Hitachinaka, Japan

Renesas is a global leader in embedded semiconductor solutions, providing high-quality products across automotive, industrial, infrastructure, and IoT sectors. With over 22,000 employees in more than 30 countries, the company focuses on scalable solutions that enhance user experience and drive innovation while committed to sustainability and energy efficiency.