Christian Klingner

Digital Circuit Design and Physical Design Methodology

Sunnyvale, California, United States

About

Work experience in USA, Japan and Germany. My area of expertise is in physical design, custom circuit design, layout design and CAD scripting. I am have basic proficiency in logic design (Verilog). Recently I have worked mostly with automated CAD flows for logic synthesis and place&route, timing analysis, ECOs. I have worked on microprocessors such as the Emotion Engine (Playstation2, MIPS), Efficeon (x86), "Denver" (First X86, then ARM) and RISC-V. Specialties: Digital custom circuit design and ASIC design, timing, library cell design, clock tree design, signal and power integrity, power analysis, CAD scripting in Perl/Tcl.

Experience

  • Sr. Staff Engineer for Physical Design at Eliyan Corporation
    Dec 2022 - Present · 3 yrs 7 mos

    Working on whatever gets thrown my way

  • Physical Design Methodology Lead at Esperanto Technologies, Inc
    Mar 2016 - Nov 2022 · 6 yrs 9 mos

    - Helped debug "mysteries" found during silicon bring-up of ET-SoC-1 - Practiced soldering of mm-sized components under microscope - Taped out AI chip with >1000 CPUs and 28 B transistors in 7nm process - Maintaining CAD tool flows for DCG, RedHawkSC, PowerArtist, DPC (MMI) - Benchmarked ICC2 against Innovus against Aprisa - QA for standard cell library collateral - Timing and power comparison between Hspice and cell level tools such as PT/PX, DCG - Wire propagation delay studies - Studied viability of asynchronous NCL circuits at low voltage - Exploration of 7nm process at transistor level with Hspice looking for trends

  • Sr. Hardware Engineer at NVIDIA
    Feb 2009 - Mar 2016 · 7 yrs 2 mos

    - Worked on formerly secret "Project Denver" from the beginning - Led physical implementation of load/store unit and data cache control unit - Championed latch based design for the project - Set up daily regressions for selected CAD flows and filed hundreds of flow bugs - Timing closure in logic synthesis and layout (P&R) - Used Nvidia's proprietary ECO tool to close Data Cache Control timing for "Carmel" tapeout - Maintained scripts for generating wire delay tables for various processes - Benchmarked Genus against DCT - Analyzed and implemented fixes for IR drop violations

  • Sr. VLSI Engineer at Stream Processors
    Mar 2007 - Feb 2009 · 2 yrs

    - Implement several blocks through automatic place&route (Talus) - Design floorplans for Multi-Core DSP (16 cores) in 65nm (TSMC) - Integrate DDR PHY and PCIE PHY IP into SOC - Participate in package design

  • Principal Engineer at Transmeta
    Feb 2000 - Feb 2007 · 7 yrs 1 mo

    - Custom design of complete fetch and scheduler data path and control logic, branch predictor - Working on global circuit implementation - Library cell design - Timing flow expert