Architect - FPGA Design, AXI/ UCIe Protocol

Category Engineering Hire Type Employee Job ID 17571 Base Salary Range $208000-$312000 Remote Eligible No Date Posted 06.01.2026

We Are

Synopsys is the leader in engineering solutions from silicon to systems, enabling customers to rapidly innovate AI-powered products. We deliver industry-leading silicon design, IP, simulation and analysis solutions, and design services. We partner closely with our customers across a wide range of industries to maximize their R&D capability and productivity, powering innovation today that ignites the ingenuity of tomorrow.

You Are

You have spent years deep in the world where real hardware meets pre-silicon design, and you know that the magic happens in the adapter layer, the piece that makes a DUT running at 10MHz talk convincingly to a PCIe Gen5 device expecting multi-gigabit speeds. You think in protocol state machines and FPGA resource budgets at the same time. You have debugged enough bring-up failures to know that the issue is almost never where it first appears, and you are the person who stays with the waveform until the actual root cause shows itself.

You are comfortable working across RTL, firmware, and board-level hardware without losing sight of what the customer is actually trying to validate. When a protocol spec says one thing and the real device does another, you figure out how to bridge that gap in a way that works in production, not just in simulation. You do not need a perfect requirements doc to start building. You talk to the IP team, the emulation team, and the customer, then you go build the thing that connects all three worlds.

At Synopsys, you will work on Speed Adapter solutions that enable the most advanced system-level validation in the industry. The protocols are cutting edge, the customers are the ones defining the next generation of silicon, and what you build will directly determine whether their chip works when it comes back from the fab.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design and develop Speed Adapter solutions for PCIe Gen5/Gen6, CXL 2.0/3.x, UCIe, and AXI protocols that bridge real-world high-speed I/O with designs running on ZeBu emulation and HAPS prototyping platforms
• Implement protocol logic and speed adaptation functionality on FPGA-based platforms, managing the translation layer between multi-gigabit real-world interfaces and reduced-speed DUTs
• Develop and debug RTL, firmware, and system-level components across the full Speed Adapter stack, from transceiver configuration to protocol state machines to host integration
• Collaborate with IP teams, emulation platform engineers, and prototyping teams to deliver integrated system-level validation solutions that customers can deploy in their labs
• Build reference designs, example flows, and integration documentation that enable customers to connect their DUTs to real devices, testers, and hosts with minimal friction
• Support customer escalations involving complex system-level issues, performing root-cause analysis across hardware, firmware, and protocol layers to deliver solutions that actually resolve the problem
• Contribute to roadmap planning and feature definition for next-generation Speed Adapter products, including emerging protocols and differentiated capabilities not available from competitors

The Impact You Will Have

• Enable top semiconductor and hyperscale customers to validate their next-generation SoCs against real-world devices months before silicon, reducing time-to-market and catching integration issues that simulation cannot find
• Deliver Speed Adapter solutions that become the reference standard for In-Circuit Emulation and system-level validation workflows across the industry
• Influence the adoption and implementation of emerging protocols like PCIe Gen7, CXL 4.0, and UCIe by building the tools that make early validation possible
• Reduce customer bring-up time from weeks to days by delivering robust, well-documented adapter solutions that work out of the box
• Shape the technical direction of Synopsys' hardware-assisted verification strategy, bridging IP, emulation, and prototyping into a unified system-level validation platform
• Contribute to patent-pending technologies that differentiate Synopsys Speed Adapter solutions from competitive offerings and create measurable value for customers
• Build the validation infrastructure that helps customers catch critical bugs in PCIe, CXL, and UCIe implementations before they become silicon respins

What You'll Need

• 12 years+ relevant experience
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or equivalent hands-on experience in digital design and FPGA-based systems
• Deep hands-on experience with at least two of the following protocols: UCIe, PCIe (Gen4 or later), CXL (2.0 or later), or AXI, including implementation or validation work, not just integration
• Strong RTL development skills and proven experience designing, debugging, and deploying logic on FPGA platforms in production or customer-facing environments
• Experience with system-level validation, emulation, or prototyping environments where you have worked across the hardware/software boundary to bring up and debug complex systems
• Solid understanding of high-speed serial interfaces, including transceiver configuration, link training, and physical layer bring-up
• Demonstrated ability to debug across RTL, firmware, and board-level hardware, using tools like waveform viewers, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers, and embedded debuggers
• Experience with ZeBu, HAPS, Veloce, Palladium, or similar emulation/prototyping platforms is a strong plus, as is familiarity with In-Circuit Emulation or Direct-ICE workflows

Who You Are

• You can walk into a customer lab where nothing is working, pull waveforms, check register states, and narrow a system-level failure down to a specific protocol violation or timing issue within a few hours
• You write RTL that other engineers can read and maintain, and you care about resource utilization, timing closure, and what happens when the design has to run on a different FPGA family next year
• You are comfortable presenting a technical tradeoff to a senior architect or customer engineering team, explaining why approach A costs more FPGA resources but solves the real-world interoperability problem that approach B does not
• You do not wait for someone else to define the integration plan. You talk to the IP team, the platform team, and the customer, then you write the plan and start building
• You have worked on at least one project where the protocol spec was still evolving, the hardware was not quite ready, and you had to build something that worked anyway
• You treat customer escalations as opportunities to understand the real problem, not just close the ticket, and you follow through until the solution is validated in the customer's environment

The Team You'll Be Part Of

You will join the Speed Adapter engineering team within the Hardware-Assisted Verification (TPG-HAV) organization, reporting to Cheng-yun Chen. This team builds the critical bridge between Synopsys' ZeBu emulation and HAPS prototyping platforms and the real-world devices, testers, and hosts that customers need to connect to their pre-silicon designs. The team works closely with IP teams developing PCIe, CXL, UCIe, and other high-speed protocols, as well as with emulation and prototyping platform engineers to deliver integrated system-level validation solutions. You will be part of a global team of engineers who are defining the next generation of In-Circuit Emulation and system-level validation technology, working on protocols and use cases that are not yet in production anywhere else in the industry.

Rewards and Benefits

We offer a comprehensive range of health, wellness, and financial benefits to cater to your needs. Our total rewards include both monetary and non-monetary offerings. Your recruiter will provide more details about the salary range and benefits during the hiring process.

#TPG

At Synopsys, we want talented people of every background to feel valued and supported to do their best work. Synopsys considers all applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, military veteran status, or disability.

In addition to the base salary, this role may be eligible for an annual bonus, equity, and other discretionary bonuses. Synopsys offers comprehensive health, wellness, and financial benefits as part of a competitive total rewards package. The actual compensation offered will be based on a number of job-related factors, including location, skills, experience, and education. Your recruiter can share more specific details on the total rewards package upon request. The base salary range for this role is across the U.S.