About this job

Sapienza Consulting, a Serco company, is recruiting a Micro-Electronics Engineer specialized in analog/mixed signal/RF microelectronics for Sapienza to work on our Customers Site (ESA-ESTEC).

Sapienza has been a partner of ESA for almost 30 years and we pride ourselves in supporting a wide range of missions including Galileo, MTG, Copernicus and ExoMars. We are one of the leading space industry and services companies who is a trusted adviser to international and national space agencies across the globe.

Responsibilities

• Provision of VLSI (ASIC & FPGA) technical expertise to Projects involving requirements analysis, performance and budgets analysis, writing and assessment of VLSI specifications; review, evaluation and checking of industrial contractor’s VLSI designs. Identification of design deficiencies and problem areas and proposals for their solutions.
• Design, analysis, verification of VLSI systems for control and data processing applications, and/or signal processing using industrial standard tools, hardware description and programming languages.
• Technical and administrative management of the ESA SystemC and synthesizable VHDL IP Core pool of designs. This work will involve: optimization, update and overall maintenance and of the ESA VHDL IP Cores databases, provision of technical support to ESA IP Cores users (performing analysis and finding solutions to problems in VHDL code, documentation or design methodology) holding a strong collaboration with our Contracts department in arranging and solving licenses and patent issues. Advertising the ESA IP service (website, workshops, etc.), handling IP cores requests and their distribution.
• The employee will support ASIC and/or FPGA technology developments for R&D and /or projects, supervising that good design practices and manufacturing and test methodologies are applied. In addition, independent verification (through code inspection, simulation and timing analysis) and validation (through HW tests) will have to be carried out for some ASIC and FPGAS developments.
• When asked to support development contracts regarding the above areas, act as the activity technical responsible, maintain interfaces with the prime contractors, participate in progress meetings and reviews, as requested, and provide appropriate feedback on the achieved progress and discussions.
• When supporting projects, interface with ESA’s project teams, the prime and lower level contractors, participate in progress meetings and reviews, as requested by project work, and provide appropriate feedback on the achieved progress and discussions.

Profile

• master’s degree in Electronics Engineering or Physics, specialized in analog/mixed signal/RF microelectronics, with five or more years of experience in at least three of the following domains:
  • transceiver (RFIC) integrated circuit blocks; low noise amplifiers, power output stages, up/down conversion stages, filters, limiters, voltage/digital controlled oscillators, charge-pump, fractional and digital phase locked loops;
  • transceiver optical/photonic (PIC) integrated electronic circuit blocks related to semiconductor photonic microelectronics; trans-impedance amplifiers, samplers, clock and data recovery, continuous-time linear equalizers, (de)modulators, phase locked loops.
  • mixed-signal circuit design, simulations and layout with Cadence Virtuoso, Spectre, SpectreRF, Mentor/Siemens EDA Calibre or equivalent tools.
  • electromagnetic simulation with Keysight ADS and/or Ansys HFSS or equivalent tools for package and PCB signal insertion/return loss, integrity, electro-magnetic interference/crosstalk/isolation optimization.
  • transceiver IC electrical functional, performance and environmental testing.
• experience package design tools such as Cadence APD/SiP or equivalent for QFN, CSP and/or SiP packages.
• experience with spectrum and vector network analyzers for measurement of IC/package/PCB s-parameters, linearity (P1dB, HD, IMD, IIP2/3, EVM, ACPR), noise figure, resonance measurements/characterization for high-speed interface performance validation, model extraction for frequency/time domain electrical simulations.
• knowledge of deep submicron SiGe BiCMOS and FinFET technologies.
• knowledge of standards for wireline physical layer of OIF CEI, Ethernet IEEE 802.3, PCIe.
• knowledge of semiconductor photonic microelectronics.
• knowledge of standards for wireless physical layer of IEEE 802.15(a) and/or 802.11.
• knowledge of high-speed optoelectronic devices (e.g., lasers, detectors, modulators), coherent transmission.
• experience with VHDL-AMS, Verilog-AMS mixed-signal hardware description language.
• experience of development, licensing and re-use of Intellectual Property (IP) cores.
• knowledge of the space environment and its effects on microelectronics devices and radiation effect mitigation techniques.
• knowledge of quality standards ESCC and ECSS applicable to VLSI ICs for space.
• comfortable with working in a diverse and multinational team environment.
• excellent interpersonal skills are needed, together with a high degree organizational and communication abilities.
• proficient in the English language, both written and spoken.
• knowledge of another EU member state language is an asset.
• candidates must be eligible to work in the EU.