Hardware Development Engineer

At Graphcore, we’re building the future of AI compute.We’re a team of semiconductor, software and AI experts, with deep experience in creating the complete AI compute stack - from silicon and software to infrastructure at datacenter scale.As part of the SoftBank Group, backed by significant long-term investment, we are delivering key technology into the fast-growing SoftBank AI ecosystem.To meet the vast and exciting AI opportunity, Graphcore is expanding its teams around the world.We are bringing together the brightest minds to solve the toughest problems, in a place where everyone has the opportunity to make an impact on the company, our products and the future of artificial intelligence.

As a hardware development engineer you will analyse system requirements and design circuit solutions, in collaboration with Graphcore’s Silicon, Architecture and Software Teams. You will generate schematics and PCB layout constraints and work closely with the PCB CAD team to realise the designs. You will define test and validation plans, run test campaigns, report results, work closely with the firmware and system architecture teams to interpret results, debug and improve performance.

You will be expert in microprocessor system design and debug, with a deep understanding of processor power supply, reset & clocking requirements, memory, communications and control interfaces.

The Team

Graphcore’s Hardware Engineering Team creates both products for sale in volume production and hardware test & validation systems based on Graphcore’s IPU processor. These systems allow Graphcore’s customers to develop leading-edge machine-learning solutions for training and inference.

What you’ll be doing

Development of production systems and test boards for Graphcore’s family of processors which includes:

Circuit design, requirements analysis, functional definition, and component selection

PCB Layout constraint definition, and support of PCB CAD layout team

Circuit validation and verification

Design and running of tests to validate circuit performance and margin

Debugging and optimisation, in collaboration with the firmware team, of the correct system performance of microcontroller hardware control code

Prototype production support, prototype bringup, evaluation & system test, prototype validation.

Support of transfer to mass production.

What you’ll bring

We appreciate not everyone will meet all of the criteria. If you meet most of the requirements below and believe you can bring value to this role, we’d love to hear from you.

Knowledge of DCDC voltage (including multi-phase) regulators, linear regulators and PCB design requirements for efficient power delivery

Processor system development, as STM32, with experience in processor interfaces such as Ethernet, PCIe, DDR, FLASH, USB, I2C, SPI, JTAG etc

Experience in SERDES (eg 112Gbps, PAM4) a benefit

Other experience required:

Demonstrable experience in digital circuit development and validation

Extensive practical lab experience, bringing up, debugging and validating designs

Expertise in the use of high-speed digital oscilloscopes, logic analysers and signal generators

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