Team & Product Overview

Qualcomm's Power Management Systems, Validation & Integration team (PMIC-SVI) leads the industry in the System Architecture and Post-silicon Validation of high-performance feature-rich Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMICs), that are embedded in our Chipsets - for smartphones, tablets, laptops, and a variety of cutting-edge consumer electronics. This team gets to work on state-of-art technology to enable products with world’s leading brands.

A typical Qualcomm PMIC is a highly advanced IC that has a whole range of analog / digital hardware (HW) blocks as organs serving dedicated functions in system steady-state, along with a brain consisting of an embedded custom mini-processor running critical firmware (FW). This brain controls the power sequencing, interrupt servicing, crash handling and various device reset scenarios. Additionally, it is responsible for maintaining various stability & performance related configurations that are part of SoC software driver initializations. Furthermore, it provides an intelligent-framework for sequencing of time-critical-operations, which otherwise can't be guaranteed by any OS / higher-level software. Often, Qualcomm chipset solutions contain multiple PMICs working together in sync – which together constitute a ‘PMIC-System’.

Job Responsibilities

This job/role is to perform System-level Validation (VI) on a limited quantity of Post-Silicon (Post-Si) HW testbenches, to ensure high quality of PMIC-System Hardware (HW) & Firmware (FW) design-deliverables – over a highly-complex & continuously-evolving product landscape.

As an applicant for this role, you will have to come up with a comprehensive VI-plan covering various user scenarios, identify individual granular test-cases & prepare to execute all steps within available test framework - based on the requirements of each PMIC-System in a Chipset-solution. These test-cases, as appropriate will have to be run (manual & automated), starting from PMIC stand-alone IC-level (on daughter-card) and expanding progressively to bigger Chipset/System-level (test-phone-device) testing, including multi-event concurrencies. One of your important contributions will be to envision new test-cases and enhance validation-coverage via automating test-execution & results-validation. Additionally, you will act as Point-of-Contact from the PMIC-SVI team to PMIC design & characterization teams as well as various other SoC HW/SW validation teams, Chipset-Power Measurement, CoreBSP-SW and Customer-Engineering teams. You will need to take ownership of activities like aligning & updating test-procedures in accordance with ever-changing PMIC-architecture & system-state flows; as well as recreating issues reported by other teams / customers, capturing signals/logs for the purpose of debugging, validating workarounds/fixes, and assessing the confidence vs risk of your validation-effort before the PMIC-System solution is ready for commercial mass-production.

Education Requirements

A Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering is a must. Master’s degree is preferred.

Minimum Qualifications

We are looking for applicants with 0-3 years (Masters) of relevant job-experience – to work with other teams on Module-level (IP in Chip) to end-Product validation, issues recreation & log collection.

Applicants must have industrial exposure of product-development via Systems Validation role in VLSI/Embedded-Systems domain. 

Preferred Qualifications

Applicants should also have exposure to basic-firmware & HW-SW interaction. They should also have strong hands-on lab-experience in Post-Si Validation of Mixed-signal (Analog/Digital) IP.

Candidates experienced in validating systems that are a combination of HW & FW (microcontroller based) would be highly preferred.

Skill sets preferred/required (of descending order of importance):

Hands-on ability & comfort in using various lab instruments like oscilloscopes, power supplies, JTAG debuggers etc. Good programming skills in at least one of the following: C#, F#, Python, Perl, LabVIEW or any other scripting language (in VLSI/Embedded Domain) Reasonable understanding of digital and analog circuit design concepts – esp. microcontrollers, DC-DC voltage-regulators, communication-protocols (e.g., I2C, SPMI) Familiarity with HW schematics and ability to trace inter connections on a PCB. Good analytical & communication (verbal/written) skills. Ability to seek information pro-actively, understand priorities and juggle multiple tasks in a highly paced environment. Experience in automating test-cases via SW-control for HW-systems Experience in coming up with top-level test-plan and breaking it down to individual test cases. Prior experience in leading & executing white-box validation efforts of a HW-module or sub-module, is a big plus. Exposure to Assembly-programming (for microcontroller) is good-to-have. Exposure to tools like JIRA and GIT are a plus.

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