Principal FPGA Emulation Engineer

Renesas Electronics•San Jose, CA

3d•Remote

About The Position

Renesas is seeking a Principal FPGA Emulation & Prototyping Engineer to build and own the FPGA-based platforms that emulate our mixed-signal power ASICs before silicon. Working shoulder to shoulder with our silicon RTL and DSP architects, you will bring their designs up on FPGA to validate real-time digital, mixed-signal, and power-control architectures pre-silicon — proving out control loops, catching RTL issues early, and de-risking tape-out. These FPGA platforms are emulation vehicles, not production hardware. Success is measured by how faithfully and how fast they reproduce the target silicon: functional equivalence to the golden ASIC RTL, real-time (or near-real-time) performance for closed-loop power and DSP validation, and deep visibility for pre-silicon debug.

Requirements

Extensive FPGA design and implementation experience (typically 10+ years), including a track record of FPGA prototyping or emulation of ASIC/SoC designs.
Expert-level RTL design in SystemVerilog and/or VHDL, with deep familiarity working from ASIC-style RTL.
Deep understanding of FPGA internal architecture and primitives — DSP/multiplier slices, block and distributed RAM, carry chains, and clocking — and a proven ability to map designs onto these resources to fit large ASIC RTL and reach real-time emulation performance (memory/SRAM macro mapping, DSP inference, clock-enable conversion, control-set and fanout management).
Hands-on experience adapting ASIC RTL for FPGA: clock-gating conversion, memory macro replacement, reset schemes, tri-state conversion, and multi-clock/CDC handling.
Strong command of the full FPGA implementation flow — synthesis, place-and-route, timing analysis, and constraint development (XDC/SDC) — on large Xilinx and/or Intel (Altera) devices, using Vivado and/or Quartus.
Hardware bring-up and debug experience: in-system logic analysis (ILA/SignalTap), lab instrumentation, and long-run pre-silicon debug.
Proficiency scripting for automation (TCL, Python).
Demonstrated technical leadership — mentoring, reviews, and driving cross-team technical decisions.
BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

Nice To Haves

Real-time, hardware-in-the-loop emulation and modeling of analog/mixed-signal and power stages (ADC/DAC/PWM interfaces, plant/converter models).
Understanding of digital power-conversion control and mixed-signal systems — converter topologies, control loops, PWM/PFM, and magnetics — to build faithful models and validate power-control architectures.
FPGA DSP implementation and real-time emulation of DSP datapaths: FIR/IIR/CIC filters, interpolation/decimation, FFT, FEC, including high-throughput techniques such as folding/unfolding.
Experience with commercial FPGA prototyping platforms such as Synopsys HAPS, Cadence Protium, or Siemens Veloce.
Model-based design with Simulink and/or Xilinx System Generator.
High-speed interface experience: JESD204B, PCIe, 1G/10G Ethernet, Aurora.
ASIC design or tape-out exposure, including DFT/scan considerations in emulation.
Ability to architect and build a custom in-house FPGA prototyping platform — board architecture, high-speed PCB design, signal integrity, and bring-up — a plus as we may develop our own hardware in the future.
Embedded/microcontroller and firmware co-development experience (C/assembly); MATLAB, C/C++.

Responsibilities

Partner closely with silicon RTL and DSP architects to bring ASIC designs up on FPGA — advising on FPGA-ability and turning architectural intent into a working, real-time emulation platform.
Adapt ASIC RTL for FPGA emulation while preserving functional equivalence to the golden design — handling clock-gating conversion, memory/SRAM macro mapping, reset and initialization schemes, tri-state/bus conversion, and stubbing or modeling of analog/mixed-signal blocks.
Map designs onto the FPGA fabric to fit and to hit emulation speed — steering resource inference (DSP/multiplier slices, block vs. distributed memory), clocking, and pipelining so the design achieves the real-time performance the validation requires.
Build the real-time environment around the digital core: model or interface to the analog and power stages (ADC/DAC/PWM, gate drivers, plant/converter models), including hardware-in-the-loop with real or emulated power hardware where needed.
Develop deep pre-silicon debug and visibility — logic analysis, long-run waveform capture, triggering, and assertions — and enable firmware/software co-development ahead of silicon.
Define and continuously improve the emulation methodology, RTL/FPGA-ability guidelines, flows, and automation (TCL/Python).
Provide technical leadership: mentor engineers, lead reviews, and drive emulation and tooling decisions across the silicon and systems teams.