Analogue RF IC Designer for EM Simulation Tasks

What You'll Do5

• Develop evaluation tasks in which a model designs a passive on-chip component, simulates it, and revises the design to meet a specification.
• Write component specifications, such as target inductance, quality factor, and area for a spiral inductor.
• Create a reference design that satisfies each task's specification.
• Write automated checks that resimulate submitted layouts and compare results against the specification.
• Complete an initial pilot of five tasks, then refine the tasks with the team before scaling the project.

Requirements5

• Hands-on experience designing RF ICs and laying out passive components.
• Experience with passives such as spiral inductors, transformers, baluns, transmission lines, coupled resonators, or quadrature hybrids.
• Ability to run electromagnetic simulations on personal layouts and interpret results, including S-parameters, inductance, and quality factor.
• Experience working with GDS layouts and S-parameter files.
• Python skills sufficient to script simulations and create automated checks.

Preferred Qualifications4

• Experience with IHP SG13G2 or another open PDK. The test chip is a 24 GHz radar receiver front end on SG13G2.
• Experience with KLayout, Palace, openEMS, ngspice, or scikit-rf. The team can share its IIC-OSIC-TOOLS container.
• Experience with commercial EM solvers such as Cadence EMX or Ansys HFSS.
• SPICE simulation experience with RF blocks such as a low-noise amplifier, a topic the team hopes to cover later.

Who Should Apply

Candidates with practical RF IC layout and EM simulation experience, confidence reading S-parameters and related results, and enough Python to build simulation scripts and checks will fit the core needs. Familiarity with open PDKs or the listed EM and SPICE tools is a plus.

Salary Insight