Senior IC Layout & Physical Design Engineer
Dresden, DE (primary site)
Full-time
Permanent employee
About the Role
We are seeking a Senior IC Layout & Physical Design Engineer to implement high-quality analog and mixed-signal layouts and contribute to full-chip physical integration of our CapRAM-based AI hardware. You will work closely with circuit designers and other engineering teams, taking ownership of layout implementation, physical verification, and chip-level integration through tape-out.
What you will do:
- Implement and optimize precision analog and mixed-signal layouts, applying advanced matching techniques such as interdigitation, common-centroid placement, symmetry, shielding, and guard rings.
- Perform full-chip integration, including block placement, I/O ring implementation, power distribution networks, and global/local signal routing using routing conduits and structured routing methodologies.
- Optimize layouts for matching, parasitic effects, noise isolation, signal integrity, and power distribution.
- Perform physical verification, including Design Rule Checking (DRC), Layout Versus Schematic (LVS), Electrical Rule Checking (ERC), electromigration (EM), and IR-drop analysis, and resolve identified violations.
- Collaborate with analog and digital design engineers on floorplanning, layout constraints, and integration requirements.
- Support parasitic extraction, post-layout verification, and final layout sign-off for tape-out.
What you should bring in:
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Microelectronics, or a related field, or equivalent relevant industry experience.
- Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience in analog or mixed-signal IC layout design.
- Strong understanding of CMOS layout principles, semiconductor process technologies, and layout-dependent effects.
- Proficiency with Cadence Virtuoso or Synopsys Custom Compiler.
- Experience with industry-standard physical verification tools and flows for DRC, LVS, DFM and parasitic extraction.
- Demonstrated experience with chip-level integration, floorplanning, I/O rings, power distribution, and hierarchical routing.
- Experience taking IC layouts through physical verification and tape-out
- Experience with advanced CMOS process technologies, including FD-SOI, high-voltage BCD and multi-layer interconnect structures.
- Strong ownership mentality.
- Effective team communication.
Helpful but not required:
- Experience with large-scale mixed-signal chip integration and complex power distribution networks.
- Experience with FinFET technologies.
- Experience with layout automation, scripting, or productivity tools such as SKILL, Tcl, or Python.
Why us?
We offer the opportunity to develop innovative AI hardware accelerator based on SEMRON's proprietary CapRAM technology in a dynamic startup environment with challenging technical problems, opportunities for professional growth and close collaboration with a multidisciplinary team across analog, digital and device engineering teams. You will have significant technical ownership of analog layout and chip-level physical integration.
About us
At SEMRON, we’re redefining what’s possible in AI hardware. Our core innovation lies in analog in-memory computing for deep neural network acceleration, enabling us to build compute architectures that scale vertically into the third dimension, much like NAND flash revolutionized memory. This leap in physical density allows us to deploy models with billions of parameters on chip areas as small as a few square millimeters.