At Kandou, we are redefining the economics of AI infrastructure. Our mission is to democratise AI by significantly reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of hardware systems — a critical barrier to scalable adoption.
Our proprietary MIMO-over-copper technology powers a high-performance, chiplet-based AI memory fabric that is both scalable and energy-efficient. Unlike traditional interconnects, our solution reduces power consumption significantly while preserving high bandwidth and ultra-low latency — unlocking unprecedented efficiency for AI training and inference at scale.
Job title: Advanced R&D - Digital Design Engineer
Location : Lausanne, Switzerland
The Digital Design Engineer designs and implements the digital sub-systems of our high-speed communication IPs — background calibration engines, adaptation loops, DSP kernels, FEC blocks, and control state machines — in advanced FinFET nodes. You will bridge system-level algorithms and mixed-signal front-ends, owning RTL through synthesis, timing closure, and low-power sign-off.
Immediate key objective
- Deliver production-quality RTL for one or more digital blocks (e.g., FEC encoder/decoder, BER-based background calibration engine, phase-interpolator control) meeting timing, area, and power targets.
- Drive DFT integration and closure for your blocks, working with the physical design team.
- Support silicon bring-up by developing firmware-level test sequences and closing the loop with characterization data.
Responsibility
- Own RTL design, synthesis, timing closure, and functional verification of assigned digital blocks.
- Define block-level architecture in collaboration with system architects and analog designers.
- Integrate blocks with DFT, low-power, and physical design flows.
- Support post-silicon bring-up, debug, validation, and productization.
- Contribute to the analysis and implementation of communication algorithms (modulation, calibration, encoding/decoding, FEC).
- Produce clear design, verification, and progress reports.
Required Experience
- 5+ years designing high-speed, power-efficient digital systems for wireline or wireless communications.
- Strong technical background in high-speed digital architectures and circuits in deep-submicron CMOS/FinFET.
- Proven experience with industry-standard synthesis, timing, and verification flows.
- Solid foundation in signal processing.
- Hands-on experience with low-power design techniques: clock gating, multi-VDD, UPF.
- CDC/RDC analysis and clock-architecture experience for high-speed sub-systems.
- Prior FEC (Reed-Solomon, LDPC) or adaptation-loop RTL implementation.
Required Skills
- Strong RTL coding (SystemVerilog), synthesis, and static timing analysis.
- Proficient with DFT insertion (scan, MBIST, JTAG) and DFM awareness.
- Hands-on with Cadence/Synopsys implementation and verification flows (Genus/Innovus or DC/ICC2, Xcelium/VCS, Spyglass, PrimeTime).
- Strong scripting (Python preferred) for design automation, tool setup, and data analysis.
- Analytical skills to translate system-level requirements into digital architectures.
- Self-motivated with strong sense of ownership; effective communicator and team player.
Required Education
- Proven experience and/or Masters or Ph.D. in E.E., Communications or other relevant fields
https://kandou.ai/