Physical Design Engineer

About the role

Fortell is building breakthrough AI-powered hearing technology that redefines how people experience sound and connect with the world. Powered by custom silicon and advances in hearing science, our hearing aids help people hear, and live, with greater clarity and confidence.

We're looking for an experienced Physical Design Engineer to help bring our next-generation custom ASICs from RTL to silicon. You'll play a critical role in delivering high-performance, low-power silicon that powers our AI-enabled hearing platform, while helping evolve the methodologies and flows that enable our engineering team to scale.

Job Responsibilities

• Execute synthesis, PNR, and STA for assigned partitions of ASIC chip adhering to strict schedules and design goals.
• Work closely with architects, RTL designers, and DFT engineers to resolve implementation and signoff issues across your blocks.
• Help close EM/IR, drive LEC and physical verification signoff for your partitions in coordination with methodology owners.
• Partner with the design team to proactively identify and address potential physical design challenges, enabling efficient iteration and convergence.
• Contribute to the refinement of other implementation and physical design methodologies, encompassing synthesis, place and route (PnR), electromigration and IR (EMIR), power delivery network (PDN), and logical equivalence checking (LEC).
• Troubleshoot flow issues and collaborate with EDA vendors to resolve them as needed.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in physical design and implementation, encompassing synthesis, PnR, timing convergence and physical verification.
• Proficiency in utilizing Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools such as Innovus, Tempus, and Quantus, as well as a deep understanding of physical design flows and methodologies.

Preferred Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in physical design roles and related activities.
• Proven ability to adhere to tight schedules and implement low-power design techniques.
• Experience in System-on-Chip (SoC) design and implementation.
• Expertise in sub-7nm node technologies.
• Familiarity with industry-standard EDA tools and their capabilities.
• Strong scripting skills in TCL to develop custom flows and methodologies on standard EDA tools from Cadence/Synopsys.