CPU Design Verification Lead

NUVACORE; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

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, and oversee pre-silicon verification as well as preparations for post-silicon verification.

You will guide DV efforts across test environments, regression, coverage, and test plans, mentoring engineers and driving best practices while ensuring high-quality design verification outcomes

Qualifications

• BS or MS with 15+ years in CPU verification.
• Understanding architecture and verification trade-offs.
• Experience with RISC-V, ARM64, or x86 ISA.
• Strong debugging and CPU troubleshooting skills.
• Experience in C, C++, SystemVerilog, scripting (Perl/Python).
• Experience mentoring DV engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead DV team to verify CPU functionality and correctness.
• Develop test environments and regression results.
• Create unit and top level test stimuli and coverage.
• Develop golden models and checkers and testbench infrastructure.
• Triage issues and write detailed bug reports.
• Develop DV methodologies and best practices for the team.
• Test CPU performance against the performance model.
• Write tests in ASM, C, C++, or other languages.
• Utilize formal methods and emulation for high-performance testing.
• Verify gate-level design and leverage accelerated test environments.

Skills

C/C++

SystemVerilog

Debugging

Leadership

Python

Education

BS or MS in EE/CS

Tools

Emulation tools

Formal verification tools

Coverage tooling

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 metics at both the unit and top level that full stresses all corners of the design
• Develop golden models and checkers and unit and top level as part of testbench 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,j 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 microarchtiecture 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

$140,000 - $250,000 a year