Pd – Senior Staff - CAD & Design Methodology, Rtl-to-Gdsii Flow
About the job
- 15+ years of experience in ASIC CAD, design methodology, or physical design with a proven record of leading multi-node, multi-foundry platform deployments.
- Demonstrated success deploying R2G platforms across multiple external foundry nodes (TSMC N3/N5/N7, Samsung SF3/SF4, GlobalFoundries GF12/GF22).
- Deep expertise in low-power design methodology — UPF/CPF flows, multi-voltage domain integration, retention strategy, and power domain verification.
- Proven expertise in clocking methodologies: Clock Mesh, Spine-and-Rib, H-Tree, and hybrid clock architectures with custom cell integration.
- Familiarity with chiplet and 2.5D integration methodology — die-to-die interface timing, UCIe/BoW PHY integration, and hierarchical top-level assembly flows.
- Exceptional problem-solving ability and communication skills — comfortable presenting to executive leadership and engaging directly with foundry technology teams.
- Architect, develop, and maintain a comprehensive RTL-to-GDSII digital implementation flow supporting multi-level hierarchical SoC designs using both top-down and bottom-up methodologies.
- Define R2G flow architecture that integrates best-in-class EDA tools from Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens — enabling a vendor-agnostic, extensible platform adaptable to evolving foundry PDKs.
- Design the Reference Design and Validation Platform (RDVP) to enable continuous RTL-to-GDSII flow development, regression, and qualification across technology nodes.
- Define design rules, constraint templates, and implementation guidelines specific to each foundry node — ensuring teams adopt correct methodology from project kickoff through tapeout.
- Collaborate with foundry technology teams at Intel Foundry, TSMC, Samsung, and GlobalFoundries to stay ahead of node-specific methodology requirements and PDK updates.
- Lead methodology and execution for low-power core design targeting aggressive PPA targets in accelerator product lines — covering power intent definition, multi-voltage domain management, and clock gating strategy.
- Define and implement CPF/UPF-based low-power flows — covering level-shifter insertion, isolation cell placement, retention register strategy, and power domain crossings verification.
- Own EM/IR methodology for low-power multi-core designs — defining PDN architecture, power strapping strategies, and EM-clean routing guidelines per foundry requirements.
- Architect hierarchical design planning methodology for large, complex SoC designs — defining partition boundaries, interface timing budgets, pin assignment constraints, and hierarchical timing models (ETMs/ILMs).
- Lead top-level and block-level floorplan development — driving macro placement, power domain definition, IO ring planning, and die size optimization for PPA.
- Define and enforce hierarchical constraints — ensuring block-level implementations are physically and electrically compatible at integration, minimizing top-level ECO iterations.
- Define and own comprehensive clocking methodology covering Clock Mesh, Spine-and-Rib, H-Tree, and hybrid topologies — selecting the optimal strategy per design class, frequency target, and power budget.
- Develop custom clock cell libraries and constraints to support low-skew, low-power clock distributions across large multi-core SoCs.
- Define system architecture to leverage external EDA ecosystem tools and methods — accelerating alignment with vendor solutions and reducing new-node bring-up time.
- Define logic synthesis methodology — specifying SDC constraint authoring guidelines, multi-corner multi-mode (MCMM) synthesis strategies, and design-for-test (DFT) integration points.
- Own static timing analysis (STA) methodology — defining corner selection, OCV/AOCV/POCV derate strategies, timing exception management, and hold/setup
- Drive continuous improvement of CAD infrastructure through automation, ML-assisted optimization, and adoption of emerging EDA capabilities.
About the company
Eliyan provides high-performance interconnect IP and chiplet products for chiplet-based systems. Its NuLink PHY enables die-to-die and chip-to-chip connections with simultaneous bidirectional signaling, delivering high bandwidth on standard organic substrates and reducing dependency on expensive advanced packaging. The company licenses IP cores and offers NuGear memory/I-O chiplets and a Universal Memory Interface to connect ASICs with multiple memory types, compatible with UCIe and BoW standards. Eliyan aims to help data centers, AI accelerators, and HPC developers build scalable, cost-effective multi-die systems with improved system performance.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series C
Total Funding
$295M
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California
Founded
2021
Get referred to Eliyan
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Eliyan closed a $145 million Series C on July 29, 2026.
- Cisco Investments and Lumentum joined in July 2026, validating optical and infrastructure demand.
- Initial chiplet shipments are expected in 2026, with low-millions revenue rising toward 2027.
What critics are saying
- PhotonIC sued Eliyan in June 2026 over breach, fraud, and trade secrets claims.
- NuLink-XD launched July 24, 2026 without named customers, volumes, or revenue commitments.
- Broadcom, Marvell, and Nvidia still own critical AI connectivity, threatening Eliyan's standalone relevance.
What makes Eliyan unique
- Ramin Farjadrad's SBD signaling doubles bandwidth on standard organic substrates, not just advanced packaging.
- Eliyan's NuLink-XD and NuGear span die-to-die, chip-to-module, and memory interfaces.
- Arm Total Design and OCP participation make Eliyan an open chiplet infrastructure player.
Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?
Benefits
Health Insurance
Paid Vacation
Flexible Work Hours
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
3%1 year growth
1%2 year growth
2%Eliyan receives takeover bid following $1 billion Series C funding. October 9, 2026 Eliyan has attracted a takeover bid after securing $1 billion in Series C funding. This development highlights the growing interest in battery energy storage systems (BESS) as demand surges for long-duration energy solutions. InfraSale's audience should monitor how this bid may impact the competitive landscape in the BESS market. investment battery storage renewables
Chiplet interconnect startup Eliyan valued at $1bn following $145m Series C funding round. Umesh Padval, managing partner of Seligman Ventures, will also join the company's board July 31, 2026 Chiplet interconnect manufacturer Eliyan has raised $145 million in a Series C funding round, valuing the startup at $1 billion. The oversubscribed round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from both new and existing investors, including Cisco Investments and Lumentum. In addition to the funding, Umesh Padval, managing partner of Seligman Ventures, will join Eliyan's Board of Directors. In a statement, Eliyan said the financing will support the development of its next-generation interconnect technologies and allow the company to expand its ecosystem partnerships and scale manufacturing. Founded in 2021 by Ramin Farjadrad, the former CTO and VP of networking at Marvell Semiconductor, along with Syrus Ziai, and Patrick Soheili, Eliyan's chiplet interconnect technology speeds up the processing for AI chips, with the company claiming it achieves up to four times the performance and half the power of other solutions. The company's NuLink PHY and NuGear offerings address both die-to-die and die-to-memory interconnect challenges through its Universal Memory Interface (UMI), a bi-directional interconnect method that enables a bandwidth-efficient connection to memory, in both standard organic substrates and advanced packaging. Chiplets are tiny integrated circuits with specialized functions, which can be combined to make larger integrated circuits. They contain multiple smaller dies, instead of one monolithic die. "AI infrastructure is undergoing one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history," said Farjadrad, who is Eliyan's CEO. "As compute, memory, packaging, and networking become increasingly interconnected, traditional approaches to system connectivity are reaching their limits. Eliyan was founded to address these challenges at the architectural level. This financing, together with the support of leading strategic and financial investors, positions us to accelerate product development, customer adoption, and ecosystem expansion as we help enable the next generation of AI infrastructure." More in investment / M&A / financing.
AI infrastructure startup Eliyan becomes unicorn after $145M Series C to solve AI data center bottlenecks. As AI companies race to build more powerful chips, one problem has become impossible to ignore: getting data in and out of those processors fast enough. Santa Clara-based startup Eliyan believes it has the answer - and investors are betting big on that vision. On Wednesday, Eliyan announced it has raised $145 million in Series C funding, valuing the company at $1 billion and officially joining the ranks of unicorn startups. The round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from new and existing investors, including Cisco Systems, Lumentum, and Umesh Padval, an early investor in networking pioneer Mellanox, whose $6.9 billion acquisition by Nvidia helped reshape the AI networking landscape. The new funding comes as demand for AI infrastructure surges and chipmakers search for ways to eliminate one of the industry's biggest performance constraints: moving data between processors quickly enough to keep increasingly powerful AI chips fully utilized. "AI infrastructure is undergoing one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history," said Ramin Farjadrad, CEO and Co-Founder of Eliyan. "As compute, memory, packaging, and networking become increasingly interconnected, traditional approaches to system connectivity are reaching their limits. Eliyan was founded to address these challenges at the architectural level. This financing, together with the support of leading strategic and financial investors, positions us to accelerate product development, customer adoption, and ecosystem expansion as we help enable the next generation of AI infrastructure." Cisco-backed Eliyan raises $145M at $1B valuation to tackle one of AI's biggest infrastructure bottlenecks. Today's AI accelerators can process information at extraordinary speeds, but many spend significant time waiting for data to arrive. As processor performance continues to outpace networking and memory bandwidth, data movement has emerged as one of the biggest obstacles to scaling AI systems efficiently. "People have tried to build faster compute, faster processors and GPUs," Eliyan co-founder and CEO Ramin Farjadrad told Reuters. "Today we are at the point that maybe only 30% to 40% of the GPUs are being used, mainly because of how fast they can receive the data to process. We're solving that problem." Eliyan develops high-speed interconnect technology and optical chiplets that help AI processors exchange data more efficiently. The company says its architecture is designed to deliver higher bandwidth while reducing power consumption and packaging complexity, allowing AI infrastructure builders to scale larger computing clusters without relying on proprietary networking ecosystems. An independent alternative for AI chipmakers. The challenge of connecting thousands of AI chips has become increasingly important as cloud providers and semiconductor companies invest billions in custom AI hardware. Nvidia addressed much of that challenge through its acquisition of Mellanox, whose networking technology became a cornerstone of the company's AI infrastructure strategy. Meanwhile, companies such as Google and Amazon Web Services rely on networking technologies from suppliers including Broadcom and Marvell Technology to support their custom AI chips. Eliyan is positioning itself as an independent alternative. Instead of building AI processors, the company licenses its interconnect technology and provides chiplets that semiconductor companies can integrate directly into their own AI chip designs. Its technology is aimed at hyperscalers, cloud providers, and semiconductor companies developing custom AI accelerators as demand grows for alternatives to off-the-shelf GPUs. From startup to unicorn. The funding also marks an important milestone for Eliyan, pushing its valuation to $1 billion less than five years after the company's founding. According to the company, initial shipments of its chiplet products are expected to begin this year. Chief Strategy and Business Officer Patrick Soheili said Eliyan expects revenue to grow from low millions of dollars in 2025 to hundreds of millions by the end of 2027 as commercial deployments accelerate. The company also says its roadmap extends beyond electrical interconnects to electro-optical connectivity, an area attracting growing attention as AI data centers require dramatically higher bandwidth while keeping energy consumption under control. As part of the financing, Seligman Ventures Managing Partner Umesh Padval, who previously served on Mellanox's board before its acquisition by Nvidia, will join Eliyan's board of directors. Why investors are paying attention. The AI boom has fueled record spending on GPUs, custom AI chips, and data centers. Increasingly, however, the limiting factor is no longer computing power alone but how efficiently those processors communicate with one another. That shift is creating opportunities for infrastructure companies focused on connectivity rather than compute. By targeting one of AI's fastest-growing bottlenecks, Eliyan is betting that the next wave of AI innovation will depend as much on moving data efficiently as on building faster processors. Investors appear to agree, backing the startup with $145 million to help bring that vision to market.
Eliyan's latest funding round, led by Seligman Ventures, values the company at $1 billion and includes new strategic investors Cisco Investments and Lumentum.
Eliyan achieves unicorn status with $145 million Series C to advance electro-optical interconnects for AI infrastructure. Eliyan's latest funding round, led by Seligman Ventures, values the company at $1 billion and includes new strategic investors Cisco Investments and Lumentum. July 29, 2026 09:25 ET | Source: Eliyan SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Eliyan Corporation, a leader in foundational connectivity technologies enabling next-generation AI compute, memory, and networking systems, today announced it has completed its Series C with a total of $145 million at a $1 billion valuation. The oversubscribed round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from additional new and existing investors, including two new strategic investors: Cisco Investments and Lumentum. The latest addition to Eliyan's strategic investor list is further testament to Eliyan's technology fit at major hyperscalers, chip developers, memory suppliers, and optical module providers. As part of the financing, veteran technology investor and operator Umesh Padval, Managing Partner of Seligman Ventures, will join Eliyan's Board of Directors. The funding positions the company to expand into the rapidly growing electro-optical interconnect technology market. It reinforces growing industry confidence in Eliyan's differentiated approach and the company's progress toward commercializing a diverse range of electrical and optical AI infrastructure architectures to meet unprecedented performance scaling, bandwidth density, high link reliability, and power efficiency requirements. Eliyan's Die-to-Die, Chip-to-Chip, and Rack-to-Rack chiplet interconnect technologies are designed to address the increasingly complex connectivity demands of next-generation AI systems spanning advanced package-level integration, multi-package scale-up architectures, memory expansion, and emerging high-bandwidth infrastructure fabrics. As AI infrastructure scales from single accelerators to rack-scale and cluster-scale systems, interconnect bandwidth, memory capacity, and power efficiency are increasingly becoming primary constraints on system performance. Technology Platform: Electro-Optical Interconnect Architecture Eliyan's technologies are designed to eliminate these bottlenecks by enabling efficient communication across compute, memory, and electro-optical domains. The company's silicon-proven NuLink(TM) PHYs and NuGear(TM) chiplet families provide scalable connectivity solutions optimized to address the growing challenges of I/O, memory, and power "walls" in AI scale-up and scale-in networks. Its expansion into optical interconnect will complement its existing strengths in electrical interconnect as it supports the industry transition toward increasingly heterogeneous, co-packaged, and bandwidth-intensive compute fabrics. Together, these capabilities position Eliyan's platform to span the full continuum of AI infrastructure connectivity from intra-package electrical interconnects to system-level optical fabrics supporting the industry's transition toward larger, more distributed, and more power-efficient AI compute systems. The financing will be used to expand Eliyan's development efforts of its next-generation interconnect technologies and products, expand ecosystem partnerships, and scale manufacturing. It follows significant commercial momentum across leading hyperscale, AI accelerator, memory, and infrastructure customers evaluating or deploying Eliyan technologies. "AI infrastructure is undergoing one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history," said Ramin Farjadrad, CEO and Co-Founder of Eliyan. "As compute, memory, packaging, and networking become increasingly interconnected, traditional approaches to system connectivity are reaching their limits. Eliyan was founded to address these challenges at the architectural level. This financing, together with the support of leading strategic and financial investors, positions us to accelerate product development, customer adoption, and ecosystem expansion as we help enable the next generation of AI infrastructure." "We are thrilled to partner with repeat founders Ramin, Patrick, and Syrus as they build a leader in high-speed interconnect technology for AI infrastructure," said Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures. "As AI systems continue to scale, efficient electrical and optical interconnects that enable future scale-up and scale-out networks between compute and memory are becoming the performance-defining technologies of modern AI data centers. Eliyan has developed a differentiated architecture to address this challenge, combining deep semiconductor expertise and a scalable approach to the evolving needs of next-generation AI systems. The team's exceptional technical depth, portfolio of more than 100 patents, marquee customer base, and validation from 12 leading strategic investors made our decision to lead this financing compelling. I look forward to bringing my board, semiconductor, and operating experience to help the company scale alongside the founding team." About Eliyan Eliyan Corporation develops advanced connectivity technologies that enable next-generation AI, cloud, and high-performance computing systems. Its portfolio of PHY, interconnect, memory-expansion, and chiplet solutions addresses critical bandwidth, power efficiency, and scalability challenges across modern compute infrastructure. Eliyan's technologies enable customers to build higher-performance systems with greater memory capacity, improved efficiency, and faster time-to-market. For more information, visit www.eliyan.com. About Seligman Ventures Seligman Ventures is the venture capital arm of Seligman Investments, focused on backing technology companies from early-stage through pre-IPO across AI and cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and modern data center hardware. Led by Managing Partners Umesh Padval and Ashish Kakran, and CFO and Operating Partner Eddie Ackerman, the firm brings together deep operating, investing, and public-markets expertise to partner with founders building category-defining companies. For more information, visit seligman.com. | For more information, contact: | | Patrick Soheili | Mike Sottak | | [email protected] | [email protected] | | +1 650-804-6658 | +1 650 248 9597 | | / | / |