CPU Design Verification Lead

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team driving efforts in building test environments which target every aspect of the CPU unit, core, or system.
• 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 metrics at both the unit and top level that fully stresses all corners of the design.
• Develop golden models and checkers at unit and top level as part of test bench 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.
• Write 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.
• Perform 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.

Qualifications

• BS or MS with 15+ years experience in CPU verification.
• Understanding of architecture and design practices and the trade-offs in verifying CPU designs.
• Experience with one or more of RISC-V, ARM64, 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

• 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 microarchitecture 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.