SoC Architecture Engineer — High-Speed Automotive SerDes SoCs (5–10 Yrs)

🏢 About Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments (TI) is a global semiconductor company designing, manufacturing, and selling analog and embedded processing chips — powering everything from industrial automation to automotive safety systems worldwide.

👥 About the Team — High Speed Data Interface Product Group

The High Speed Data Interface product group focuses on the development of differentiated high-speed SerDes SoCs targeted for automotive and industrial markets. There are two primary focus areas — Ethernet PHY and FPD-Link.

Ethernet PHY Group: A large number of applications — like in-vehicle driver alertness monitors, steering, or accelerator control in automotive and robotic applications — require an Ethernet interface. The ubiquity of Ethernet-enabled devices allows customers to simplify connecting large numbers of devices in automotive and robotic environments. Customers expect robust performance in the presence of interference and ESD events, along with processing offload capabilities. The low-cost migration from CAN to Ethernet presents unique challenges requiring interdisciplinary skills with aggressive cost and power targets.

FPD-Link Group: The proprietary FPD-Link interface addresses multi-gigabit (up to 20 Gbps) automotive and industrial sensor and display markets. Constant increase in density of electronic sensing and display content is pushing data rate (>20 Gbps) and BER performance requirements higher. Automotive functional safety requirements demand robust performance at these high data rates under challenging environments while maintaining low power consumption.

The Broader Mission: As part of this product group, you will be engaged in designing solutions spanning Analog, Digital, and Signal Processing domains to mitigate impairments such as high channel loss, ESD strikes, and narrowband interference. The team implements high-performance equalization circuits (CTLE, FFE, DFE), high-speed converters (DAC, ADC), high-speed digital front-ends, signal processing algorithms, embedded microcontrollers, and high-speed interfaces for camera and display systems. The team has successfully achieved several differentiated innovations through collaborative cross-domain optimization.

🌟 The entire product lifecycle — from product specification to customer and application support — is owned by the product group in Bangalore, giving each team member tremendous learning opportunity and enhanced scope to influence the global success of the product. We are looking for passionate, creative, and self-driven engineers who challenge traditional techniques and come up with innovative solutions to make a difference.

🎯 Role Overview

As a SoC Architecture Engineer, you will be the intellectual anchor of the product group. You will conceive, define, and validate the end-to-end architecture of next-generation high-speed automotive SerDes SoCs — making critical decisions on system partitioning, block-level microarchitecture, power/performance/area trade-offs, and cross-domain integration across analog, digital, signal processing, and firmware subsystems. Your architectural decisions will directly determine the competitive differentiation and market success of TI's Ethernet PHY and FPD-Link products.

🔧 Key Responsibilities

Define and own full-chip SoC architecture for next-generation Ethernet PHY and FPD-Link SerDes SoCs — from top-level system partitioning to block-level microarchitecture
Establish system-level performance budgets — BER, power, latency, jitter, ESD immunity — and allocate them across analog, digital, DSP, and firmware subsystems
Drive architecture trade-off analyses across competing design approaches in analog, digital, and mixed-signal domains to arrive at optimal SoC solutions
Develop and maintain SoC architecture documents, interface specifications, and design guidelines as authoritative references for the engineering team
Lead cross-domain integration decisions — defining interfaces between analog front-ends, digital back-ends, embedded microcontrollers, and high-speed I/O
Identify and champion architectural innovations for next-generation products through competitive benchmarking, technology surveys, and first-principles analysis
Collaborate with product marketing and systems teams to translate market requirements and customer pain points into precise SoC architectural decisions
Guide and mentor design engineers across domains, ensuring architectural intent is faithfully realized in RTL, circuits, firmware, and physical implementation
Contribute to IP generation, patent filings, and external publications representing TI's architectural innovations

✅ Required Qualifications

Education: B.Tech / M.Tech / Ph.D. in Electronics / VLSI / Communications / Electrical Engineering
Experience: 5–10 years of SoC architecture or senior design experience across multiple domains
Demonstrated ability to architect complex mixed-signal SoCs spanning analog, digital, and firmware domains
Deep understanding of high-speed SerDes system architecture — PHY layer, link protocol, equalization, clock/data recovery
Strong proficiency in system-level modeling and performance simulation (MATLAB, Python, SystemC)
Broad knowledge across analog circuit design, digital RTL, DSP algorithms, and embedded software
Proven track record of driving silicon from architecture to tapeout on production-grade SoCs
Excellent technical communication — ability to present complex trade-offs to diverse audiences

🌟 Preferred / Good-to-Have Skills

Deep expertise in Ethernet PHY (100BASE-T1, 1000BASE-T1, 10GBASE-T1) or FPD-Link / MIPI protocol architecture
Knowledge of automotive functional safety architecture (ISO 26262, ASIL decomposition at SoC level)
Experience with power architecture — multi-voltage domain planning, dynamic voltage-frequency scaling
Background in technology node selection and process-architecture co-optimization
Track record of patent generation in SerDes, mixed-signal, or SoC architecture domains

💡 What Makes This Role Unique

🧠 Architectural Ownership You define the silicon blueprint that the entire team builds to
🚗 Automotive Scale Your architecture reaches millions of vehicles and industrial systems
🔄 Full Lifecycle Vision Spec → Architecture → Silicon → Customer — all driven from Bangalore
🌉 Broadest Technical Canvas Work across every domain — analog, digital, DSP, physical
🌍 Global Influence Shape TI's most strategic automotive connectivity products
📈 Maximum Career Leverage The highest-impact technical role in the product group
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