Principal Hardware ASIC Architect engineer
NXP Semiconductors · Hyderabad, India · 2mo ago
Job Description
Job Title: Principal Hardware ASIC Architect Engineer
Hyderabad, India
About the Role
We are seeking an experienced Hardware Architect with strong expertise in SOC-architecture, Micro-architecture design, RTL coding and system-level performance/power analysis.
The ideal candidate will have a track record of owning complex blocks or subsystems from concept through silicon, balancing performance, power, and area (PPA), and working closely with software, asic-design, asic-verification, asic-physicaldesign teams. it requires deep architectural insight and hands-on implementation understanding to help guide design trade-offs and drive the next generation of AI inference accelerators.
This is what you are responsible for
Architecture & Micro-Architecture
- Define product feature and capabilities and own the architecture for compute, memory, interconnect & high-speed interface subsystems in the AI inference chip.
- Collaborate with various software teams to co-optimize hardware features for AI workloads.
- Collaborate with RTL designers to identify complex technical issues/risks. Review and guide RTL implementation, ensuring consistency with architectural intent and timing/power goals
- Collaborate with Physical-design teams for Area/Floorplan refinement, Timing targets etc.
- Define and document interface specifications, control/status logic, and pipeline structures.
- Lead PPA analysis and trade-off discussions across RTL and architecture.
AI Workloads & HW-SW Co-Design
- Collaborate closely with various software to co-optimize hardware features for real-world AI inference workloads.
- Incorporate considerations such as, quantization, sparsity, dataflow, scheduling, memory bandwidth into architectural decisions.
- Guide hardware features that improve programmability, debuggability, and long-term software scalability.
Modelling & Analysis
- Develop and maintain high-level architecture and performance models.
- Use simulation and architectural models to guide RTL-level improvements.
- Validate model predictions against RTL or emulation results and refine accordingly.
- Strong understanding of AI inference workloads, dataflows, quantization, and memory/bandwidth bottlenecks in edge deployments
Necessary Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field.
- 12+ years of experience in SOC design, SOC architecture, RTL design, micro-architecture.
- Strong understanding of computer architecture, memory hierarchies, SoC interconnects, and AI/ML compute architectures.
- Proven experience optimizing for performance, power, and area.
- Hands-on expertise in Verilog/SystemVerilog, C/C++, and scripting (Python/Tcl/Perl)
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with AI accelerators, DSPs, or high-performance CPUs/GPUs.
- Familiarity with performance modeling frameworks (e.g., Python/C++ based).
- Exposure to EDA tools, power/performance analysis, and hardware-software co-design.
- Strong analytical skills and a collaborative mindset.