Wireless Radio Frequency PHY Firmware Engineer

Summary

Would you like to join Apple’s growing Wireless Connectivity Silicon team? Our wireless System on a Chip (SoC) organization is responsible for all aspects of wireless silicon development with a particular emphasis on highly energy efficient design and new technologies that transform the user experience at the product level, all of which is driven by a world-class vertically integrated engineering team spanning RF/Analog architecture and design, Systems/PHY/MAC architecture and design, VLSI/RTL design and integration, Emulation, Design Verification, Test and Validation, and FW/SW engineering. In this highly visible role, you will be at the center of a silicon design group with a critical impact on getting functional wireless products to hundreds of millions of customers! Responsible for crafting and implementing embedded firmware for SoC bring up and wireless connectivity enablement. You will work closely with product software and manufacturing teams to enable RF and PHY calibrations, algorithms and testing to enable productization of the silicon / system.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelors Degree in EE,CE, or related field. Embedded systems knowledge including: Multi thread environment. Interrupt thread processing/latency. HW/FW semaphores/resource management.

Preferred Qualifications

Strong background in embedded FW development using C and assembly languages, familiarity with ARM CPUs and its internals. Good understanding of embedded wireless communication systems, Radio and PHY fundamentals and key RF performance metrics. Familiarity with digital signal processing algorithms. Familiarity with Multi core environment. Understanding python match library like numpy/SciPy and how to convert it to embedded C. Understanding difference between fix point and floating points and how to make arithmetic tradeoff and simplify embedded usage. Experience with low-level hardware interfaces, register and interrupt programming, bare-metal software development, clock and power management. Solid understanding of basic embedded concepts such as RTOS, concurrency, multi-processor systems. Fluency in using lab equipment such as logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, network analyzers, spectrum analyzers, signal generators, and power meters. Experience implementing diagnostics, manufacturing tests, and protocol compliance software. Knowledgeable of industry standards for wireless communications such as Bluetooth, WLAN, ZigBee, UWB. Proficient in at least one of the scripting languages such as Python, Perl, or Tcl. Excellent communication skills – both written and oral.

Description

As an Embedded FW Engineer, the individual will be a core member of a Wireless SoC firmware team, with emphasis on PHY bring up, RF calibrations, signal processing algorithm implementation and performance tuning. - Work closely with product SW and manufacturing teams to provide system-level API and firmware functionality to meet productization needs. Develop SoC test and calibration capabilities for wafer, module, and system factories. - Collaborate with RF/Radio design, DVT, PHY and System engineering teams to architect, define and implement innovative algorithms, calibrations and protocols. - Debug realtime systems with limited visibility, working hands-on with development boards and lab equipment. - Support pre-silicon validation efforts, including simulation, emulation, and FPGA prototyping. - Support post-silicon bringup, validation, performance characterization, system integration and debug.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with the systems team to understand algorithm implementations in Python. Implement algorithms on embedded CPUs. Ensure firmware results are aligned with the Python reference implementation. Integrate algorithms into the firmware flow to enable time-critical, online calibration. Debug and resolve issues related to corner cases, part-to-part variations, and other anomalies. Handle error conditions and implement appropriate recovery mechanisms.