HW System / SoC Architect
Role Summary
We're looking for a senior SoC Architect to be the primary architectural voice for our Singapore engineering team. You'll own the architecture of our SoC's peripheral subsystems - audio, imaging and display, and high- and low-speed interfaces - designed for the extreme power budgets of battery-powered wearables and IoT devices.
On our sub-threshold silicon, external interfaces are often the single biggest driver of system power. That makes decisions most teams treat as routine - when a link wakes, what stays retained, how data moves without waking the CPU - first-order architectural problems. This role sits at the center of that challenge, spanning everything from the transistor to the cable in your hand.
This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role.
Responsibilities:
- Architecture specifications for the SoC’s peripheral subsystems: micro-architecture definition, flow and sequence diagrams, power and performance models, and pseudocode - the documents RTL design and verification teams implement
- Off-die interface definition - modes, electrical and protocol behavior, and integration requirements that account for boards, cables, connectors, PHYs, and the software driver model
- Debug at RTL and gate level with the design team when implementation raises questions the specification must answer
- Partnership with physical design to ensure robust, optimal implementation of what you specify
- Power and performance trade-off analysis across full system dataflows - die, package, board, and software - guiding both hardware and software development
- IP investigation, assessment, and selection - build-vs-license recommendations with the analysis to back them
- Integration specifications covering system interfaces and external power management
- Post-silicon analysis and support for delivery of SoC functionality into mass production
- Use case and test case definition in support of validation
Who you’ll work with
RTL design and verification, physical design, our FPGA bring-up team, software architecture, and colleagues in Marketing, Advanced Development, and our HQ architecture team plus customers and field teams on key features and competitive positioning.
Requirements:
- A track record of authoring architecture specifications for SoCs, ASICs, or silicon IP that hardware teams implemented in RTL - this is the core of the role
- 8+ years in SoC/ASIC architecture and design, or silicon IP development, for wearable, IoT, or mobile-class products (hardware/RTL background - not firmware or driver development)
- Hands-on experience architecting external interfaces: audio (I2S, PDM), imaging/display (MIPI CSI/DSI), and high/low-speed links (USB, SPI, I2C)
- Working knowledge of each interface on both sides of the package: board-level electrical constraints, cable/connector requirements (e.g., USB power delivery), PHY integration, and OS driver models
- Experience shipping low-power silicon architectures to market, from concept through post-silicon validation
- Strong systems-level thinking across the hardware/software boundary
- The ability to build consensus and drive alignment across distributed teams
- Excellent written and verbal communication
- BS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science
Nice to Have
- MS or PhD in a related field
- Experience with SoC fabric/interconnect, power management architecture, or UPF/power-aware design flows
- Hands-on work on advanced process nodes
- Familiarity with low-power mobile consumer systems, embedded imaging, or neural network processing
EA Personnel Registration No: R1106329
EA License No: 12C6254