FPGA Engineer

Job Summary

The Principal/Senior FPGA Engineer will be responsible for leading development of complex RF/microwave systems facilitated by FPGA technology for utilization in cyber, DoD communications, and commercial communications solutions. The applicant must have extensive experience in the design, analysis, simulation, and testing of FPGA firmware/software, specifically applied to 3

GPP based systems. This position will work closely with antenna engineers on state-of-the-art phased array antennas, so a solid foundational understanding is needed of multi-channel, phase coherent applications including Electronic Beam Steering (EBS). Additionally, the position will apply open standards for Digital RF data and control including VITA
49.2, O-RAN 7.2, eCPRI, IEEE
1914.3. A successful candidate will be capable of making technical presentations to peers, program leadership, and customers and assist in new business development.

The candidate will provide technical leadership, subject matter expertise and individual execution within engineering projects requiring design, prototyping, analysis, testing, and integration of FPGA firmware/software for RF/microwave and 5G systems into multi-disciplinary engineering solutions. These solutions will be deployed around the world and provide essential capabilities to operators in a wide variety of domains including communications, signal intelligence, and cyber.

Travel may be required.

Responsibilities include:

• Ability to work independently, as well as direct and coordinate work of multi-disciplinary engineering teams to assure the successful development of FPGA based RF systems and assemblies.
• Participate and foster the collaborative team culture of design through rigorous and iterative modeling, simulation, and measurement.
• Mentor and train junior and mid-level engineers.
• Engineering design process development and maturation
• Customer and sub-contractor coordination
• Leading the creation of technical content for proposals and white papers
• Create technical documentation, test plans and reports.
• Conduct experiments and testing in both a laboratory and field environment.

Ability to obtain/maintain a government security clearance (Must be a Sole US Citizen)

Education and Experience A successful candidate will have one of the following sets of education and experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering (EE) or related field 8 years of experience
• Master’s degree in EE or related field + 5 years of experience
• PhD in EE or related field + 2 years of experience

Expertise and Competencies 8+ years of experience are required in the following skills:

• FPGA development for communications and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications
• Implementing Electronic Beam Steering (EBS) and Direction Finding (DF) functionality on an FPGA
• Writing FPGA firmware using VHDL and Verilog
• Software development in C or C++
• Evaluation and integration third-party intellectual property and debugging cores into FPGA based solutions.
• FPGA firmware/software development utilizing a combination of FPGA fabric and embedded processor cores.
• Testing using standard EE and RF/microwave equipment such as vector network analyzers, power meters, oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, noise sources, multimeter, and signal sources.
• Technical writing for documents like proposals, white papers, test plans and reports
• Leadership of technical teams comprised of more than 3 people.

Experience in the following skills:

• Digital I/Q streaming protocols including eCPRI, IEEE
  1914.3 or similar
• Digital RF architectures including VITA
  49.2, O-RAN 7.2
• FPGA development for 3
  
  GPP compliant remote radio heads or radio units. Preferably using Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) standards

• Hands-on experience with the Xilinx RFSoC or equivalent
• Use and/or design of FPGA-based Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms.
• Experience using MATLAB for analysis and design of DSP or related data processing systems.
• Extensive experience and/or course work in electromagnetic theory and its applications including antenna design.
• Microwave/RF system, subsystem and component analysis, design, prototyping, testing…