RFIC Design Engineer

Apple • Irvine, CA

15h

About The Position

As an RFIC Design Engineer within the Wireless Radio team, you will contribute to wireless SoC design and develop RFICs for Apple Wireless Connectivity products, driving designs through mass production. The wireless RFIC team architects, designs, and validates radio transceivers integrated into wireless SoCs. The role works across engineering disciplines to develop wireless connectivity solutions for Apple products.

You will contribute hands-on throughout the design process, from concept, architecture, and topology through transistor-level feasibility studies, power, area, and performance trade-off analysis, implementation, simulations, and extractions. You will design radio transceiver building blocks and chains, including transmit (TX), receive (RX), and PLL-LOGen, and collaborate with RF Systems on specifications and the distribution of specification margins. The work also includes RF and analog loopbacks for calibration and compensation, addressing coexistence requirements, collaborating with RFIC test engineers during productization, and correlating design results with silicon measurements to support compliance in volume production.

Requirements

• Bachelor of Science degree and 3 or more 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 and HFSS, or similar tools.
• RF/analog and mixed-signal design experience in RF CMOS design.
• Deep understanding of analog, mixed-signal, and RF circuit design.
• Experience designing LNAs, PAs, PLL/VCO/DCO/LOGEN blocks, mixers, baseband filters and amplifiers, data converters, and calibration methods for high-performance wireless systems.
• Experience in silicon characterization and debugging.

Nice To Haves

• MSEE or PhD, plus relevant industry experience.
• Deep experience crafting and bringing wireless transceivers into mass production.
• Familiarity with RF transceiver architectures, their trade-offs and system specifications, and translating system requirements into IC-level circuit requirements with system architects.
• Understanding of how modulation type affects radio architecture and requirements.
• Proven capability to work with digital design groups on partitioning between digital and analog domains.
• Familiarity with mixed-signal mode verification methodology, including SystemVerilog, AMS, and Nanotime.

Responsibilities

• Contribute hands-on to RFIC design from concept, architecture, and topology through transistor-level feasibility studies, trade-off analysis, design, simulations, and extractions.
• Design and deliver radio transceiver building blocks and chains, including TX, RX, and PLL-LOGen for wireless connectivity products.
• Work with RF Systems on block-level and high-level specifications for TX/RX lineups 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 during productization.
• Correlate design results with silicon measurements and support specification compliance for volume production.
• Work with system architects to translate system requirements into circuit requirements at the IC level.
• Work with digital design groups to determine an effective partition between digital and analog domains.

What This Job Offers

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