CPU Design Verification Lead

Nuvacore; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Nuvacore in Austin, Texas is seeking a Design Verification Lead to head the team verifying functionality and correctness of a next-generation CPU. You will oversee all pre-silicon verification activities and prepare for post-silicon validation, driving test plans, stimulus creation, and coverage for CPU units, cores, and system contexts.

You will build test environments, develop regression flows, and mentor a DV team of engineers.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in computer science or electrical engineering with 15+ years in CPU verification.
• Strong architecture and design verification practices and trade-offs.
• Experience with RISC-V, ARM64, or x86 ISAs.
• Excellent debugging and communication skills for CPU teams.
• Proficiency in C, C++, SystemVerilog, scripting languages such as Perl or Python.
• Experience managing and mentoring DV engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead verification of CPU units, cores, and system levels across pre- and post-silicon phases.
• Build test environments and regression suites to uncover design weaknesses.
• Develop test plans, stimuli, coverage metrics, and golden models.
• Triaging issues and writing detailed bug reports for the design team.
• Set up DV methodologies and best practices for the team.
• Prepare performance verification against performance models and optimize tests.

Skills

CPU verification

Debugging

Leadership

Communication

C/C++

SystemVerilog

Python/Perl

Education

BS or MS in CS/EE

Tools

SystemVerilog

C/C++

Perl

Python

Job description

Nuvacore is building a ground-up high performance, low-power CPU for next-generation compute workloads. As Design Verification Lead you will lead the team verifying functionality and correctness of the CPU design. You will be responsible for all phases of pre-silicon verification as well as preparing for post-silicon verification.

THE ROLE

As a CPU Design Verification (DV) Lead, you will lead the team that is driving efforts in all the following areas:

• Building test environments which target every aspect of the CPU unit, core, or system. Your goal is to find every weakness and flaw in the design using proven verification techniques.

• Develop methodology and flows for running simulations and generate all regression results and debug information.

• Create test stimulus and relevant coverage metrics at both the unit and top level that fully stresses all corners of the design

• Develop golden models and checkers at unit and top level as part of test bench infrastructure

• Triage issues and write up detailed bug reports to assist the CPU design team in fixing design issues.

• Develop and write detailed test plans for the CPU units, core, or system.

• Develop DV methodologies and best practices for the team.

• Test and debug the performance of a CPU against the performance model.

• Writing tests in ASM, C, C++, or other to test the CPU’s correctness according to the test plan

• Leverage formal methods and tools as another approach to determining design correctness

• Verification and testing of the gate level design of the CPU.

• Set up and leverage accelerated test environments such as emulation for high performance design testing

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• BS or MS with 15+ years experience in CPU verification

• Understanding in architecture and design practices and the trade-offs in verifying CPU designs.

• Experience with one or more of RISC-V, ARM64, or x86 ISA

• Strong communication skills and aptitude in debugging and breaking things in CPUs

• Experience in C, C++, System Verilog, scripting and other languages such as Perl or Python

• Experience managing and mentoring DV engineers

REQUIREMENTS — PREFERRED

• Years of expertise in multiple areas of CPU verification including unit level testing, top level testing, emulation, formal verification, coverage metrics

• Expertise in one or more areas of CPU microarchitecture including instruction fetch, branch prediction; instruction decoding, scheduling and register renaming; out-of-order execution; integer and floating point execution; load/store execution; prefetching; cache and memory subsystems; translation and memory management; memory coherence and ordering; power and thermal management; and clocking / reset design

• Strong background in low power microarchitecture and high-performance verification techniques, with a proven track record of verification and sign-off on multiple CPU programs.

• Experience managing large (20+) person design verification teams

$200,000 - $300,000 a year