ASIC Design Engineer — Neural Engine DMA

Computational photography, live language translation, and countless other on-device AI capabilities depend on moving enormous amounts of data between memory and compute at exactly the right time. As part of our Silicon Engineering Group, you will help build the high-performance DMA engines responsible for moving model weights and activation tensors between the memory subsystem and the Apple Neural Engine. In this role, you will collaborate closely with architecture and verification teams across the full front-end design cycle. The work you contribute ships in Apple products used by billions of people every day.

Description

As an ASIC Design Engineer on the ANE DMA Design team, you will contribute to the design of DMA subsystem blocks from microarchitecture specification through tapeout. High-performance DMA involves hard problems in data movement, throughput, and correctness. In this front-end design role, your work will include: - Writing well-parameterized RTL structured for correct synthesis, clean timing, and low power, along with assertions and cover points that encode design intent and ensure verification completeness. - Executing front-end implementation tasks: synthesis, timing closure, area and power analysis, linting, and logic equivalence checks. - Collaborating with fellow designers and architecture teams to understand design requirements, contribute to micro-architectural specifications, and develop solutions that meet performance, power, and area targets. - Working closely with design verification and formal verification teams to ensure functional correctness: reviewing test plans, debugging failures, and ensuring the design's intended behavior is fully exercised.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelors Degree plus 0 years of industry experience

Preferred Qualifications

Familiarity with Verilog or SystemVerilog and core digital design fundamentals: finite state machines, pipelining, parallelism, and timing. Some exposure to on-chip bus protocols such as AMBA (AXI, AHB, APB). Interest in or exposure to system-level concepts: how data moves through a SoC, flow control between producers and consumers, memory system latency and bandwidth trade-offs, and how hardware and software divide responsibilities at system boundaries. Background in or curiosity about high-bandwidth domains: networking, image and video processing, multimedia, or AI/ML. Familiarity with scripting languages (Python, Perl, Tcl) for design automation. Clear technical writing skills and the habits of asking good questions, flagging issues early, and contributing constructively in design reviews.