Principal FPGA Emulation Engineer

About the Role

Renesas is seeking a Principal FPGA Emulation & Prototyping Engineer to build and own the FPGA-based platforms that emulate our mixed-signal power ASICs before silicon. Working shoulder to shoulder with our silicon RTL and DSP architects, you will bring their designs up on FPGA to validate real-time digital, mixed-signal, and power-control architectures pre-silicon — proving out control loops, catching RTL issues early, and de-risking tape-out.

These FPGA platforms are emulation vehicles, not production hardware. Success is measured by how faithfully and how fast they reproduce the target silicon: functional equivalence to the golden ASIC RTL, real-time (or near-real-time) performance for closed-loop power and DSP validation, and deep visibility for pre-silicon debug.

What You'll Do

• Partner closely with silicon RTL and DSP architects to bring ASIC designs up on FPGA — advising on FPGA-ability and turning architectural intent into a working, real-time emulation platform.
• Adapt ASIC RTL for FPGA emulation while preserving functional equivalence to the golden design — handling clock-gating conversion, memory/SRAM macro mapping, reset and initialization schemes, tri-state/bus conversion, and stubbing or modeling of analog/mixed-signal blocks.
• Map designs onto the FPGA fabric to fit and to hit emulation speed — steering resource inference (DSP/multiplier slices, block vs. distributed memory), clocking, and pipelining so the design achieves the real-time performance the validation requires.
• Build the real-time environment around the digital core: model or interface to the analog and power stages (ADC/DAC/PWM, gate drivers, plant/converter models), including hardware-in-the-loop with real or emulated power hardware where needed.
• Develop deep pre-silicon debug and visibility — logic analysis, long-run waveform capture, triggering, and assertions — and enable firmware/software co-development ahead of silicon.
• Define and continuously improve the emulation methodology, RTL/FPGA-ability guidelines, flows, and automation (TCL/Python).
• Provide technical leadership: mentor engineers, lead reviews, and drive emulation and tooling decisions across the silicon and systems teams.

Function: Manufacturing
Experience Level: Mid-Senior Level