Entry Level- FPGA Engineer; Onsite- Aberdeen, Maryland

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3 days ago Requisition

Salary Range: $75,000.00 To $85,000.00 Annually

ENTRY-LEVEL FPGA ENGINEER

xG and Mixed Signal Product Development | Technical Services

Fairwinds Technologies is continuously looking for curious, hands-on early-career engineers who want to turn digital design concepts into working hardware for radios, RF systems, embedded platforms, and operationally relevant test environments. In this role, you may support either our xG or Mixed Signal product development team, or technical-services contracts aligned with those product areas.

You will work alongside experienced FPGA, DSP, RF, embedded software, systems, and test engineers to design, simulate, implement, integrate, and verify programmable-logic solutions. Assignments may span internal product development and customer-funded research, integration, test, demonstration, and field-support activities. The position is designed to build practical engineering depth while giving an early-career engineer exposure to the full lifecycle from requirements and architecture through hardware verification and measured system performance.

• Design, implement, simulate, and verify FPGA logic using VHDL, Verilog, or System Verilog under the guidance of experienced engineers.
• Develop reusable modules for data movement, control, timing, digital interfaces, buffering, signal processing, monitoring, and system integration.
• Create test benches, test vectors, assertions, and repeatable verification procedures to demonstrate functional and timing performance.
• Use FPGA vendor development tools to synthesize, place and route, analyze timing, program devices, and debug designs in laboratory hardware.
• Support device and board bring-up involving FPGAs, data converters, processors, memory, clocks, radios, RF front ends, and high-speed digital interfaces.
• Collaborate with DSP engineers to translate algorithms and reference models into fixed-point, pipelined, resource-aware hardware implementations.
• Collaborate with embedded software engineers on register maps, control interfaces, drivers, configuration, telemetry, and embedded Linux integration.
• Use simulation, on-chip debug tools, laboratory instruments, and captured data to identify root causes and validate corrective actions.
• Participate in code reviews, configuration management, issue tracking, design reviews, and continuous integration practices.
• Prepare clear design descriptions, interface documentation, verification results, test reports, and configuration records for product and customer-funded activities.

Depending on assignment, you may contribute in one or more of the following areas:

• xG wireless systems, including 5G, non-terrestrial networking, software-defined radio, tactical communications, radio integration, and networked edge systems.
• Mixed Signal products, including Global Link and Echo Phase-related capabilities, channel emulation, coherent combining, wideband signal processing, and high-speed data-converter interfaces.
• Digital up conversion and down conversion, filtering, channelization, synchronization, buffering, timing, control, calibration, and real-time data paths.
• Ruggedized mission modules and RF systems that combine FPGA logic, embedded compute, networking, radio, and mixed-signal hardware.
• Government-funded R&D and technical-services contracts involving architecture, implementation, integration, verification, demonstrations, documentation, and field support.

• Hands-on experience with an AMD/Xilinx, Intel/Altera, Microchip, Lattice, or comparable FPGA development board and toolchain.
• Exposure to high-speed interfaces, data converters, DDR memory, Ethernet, PCIe, JESD
  204, SPI, I2C, UART, AXI, or similar buses and protocols.
• Familiarity with fixed-point arithmetic, digital signal processing, software-defined radio, clock-domain crossing, timing closure, or hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Experience using Python, MATLAB, Simulink, cocotb, C or C++, Linux, Git, scripting, or automated build and verification workflows.
• Coursework or project experience in wireless communications, RF systems, signal processing, 5G/LTE, non-terrestrial networks, radar, satellite communications, or test and measurement.

• Work on products and customer-funded R&D activities within the same…