RFIC Design Engineer

Apple • Irvine, CA

1d

About The Position

As part of Apple’s Wireless Radio team, the RFIC Design Engineer contributes to wireless SoC design and develops RFIC designs for Apple Wireless Connectivity products through mass production. The wireless RFIC team architects, designs, and validates radio transceivers integrated into wireless SoCs, working within a vertically integrated engineering organization spanning RF/analog, systems, VLSI/RTL, emulation, verification, test and validation, and firmware/software engineering.

The role involves hands-on design work from concept, architecture, and topology through transistor-level feasibility studies, power/area/performance trade-offs, design, simulation, and extraction. The engineer designs and delivers radio transceiver building blocks and chains, including transmit (TX), receive (RX), and PLL-LO generation (PLL-LOGen). They collaborate with RF Systems on specifications and margin allocation, design RF and analog loopbacks for calibration and compensation, address coexistence requirements, and work with RFIC test engineers during setup, debugging, and optimization. The role also includes correlating design results with silicon measurements and ensuring specification compliance for volume production.

Requirements

• Bachelor of Science degree and at least 3 years of relevant industry experience.
• Understanding of analog design concepts, including noise analysis, linearity, mismatch, stability, and other analog impairments.
• Experience with Cadence Virtuoso, Spectre RF, Matlab, EM simulation tools such as EMX or HFSS, and similar tools.
• RF/analog and mixed-signal design experience in RF CMOS design.
• Deep understanding of analog, mixed-signal, and RF circuit design.
• Circuit-design knowledge covering LNAs, PAs, PLL/VCO/DCO/LOGEN blocks, mixers, baseband filters and amplifiers, data converters, and calibration methods for high-performance wireless systems.
• Experience with silicon characterization and debugging.

Nice To Haves

• MSEE and PhD, in addition to relevant industry experience.
• Experience crafting and bringing wireless transceivers into mass production.
• Familiarity with RF transceiver architectures, their trade-offs, and system specifications.
• Ability to work with system architects to translate system requirements into circuit requirements at the IC level.
• Understanding of how modulation type affects radio architecture and requirements.
• Proven ability to work with digital design groups to optimize partitioning between digital and analog domains.
• Familiarity with mixed-signal mode verification methodologies, including SystemVerilog, AMS, and Nanotime.

Responsibilities

• Provide RFIC designs for wireless SoCs and drive them to mass production for Apple Wireless Connectivity products.
• Contribute hands-on across concept, architecture, topology, transistor-level feasibility studies, power/area/performance trade-off analysis, design, simulations, and extractions.
• Design and deliver radio transceiver building blocks and chains, including TX, RX, and PLL-LOGen.
• Work with RF Systems on block-level and high-level specifications for TX/RX line-ups and PLL-LOGen, including accurate distribution of specification margins across the chain.
• Design RF and analog loopbacks for calibration and compensation.
• Address coexistence scenarios and design to meet CoEx requirements.
• Collaborate with RFIC test engineers on setup, debugging, and optimization of wireless connectivity chips throughout productization.
• Correlate design results with silicon measurements and ensure compliance with specifications for volume production.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level