Power Electronics & Motor Drives Engineer — PhD​/Postdoctoral Development Programme

Company Overview

Novomorphic is a new semiconductor design venture backed by Cadence Design Systems, Welsh Government, and CSA Catapult. We have been established to build critical semiconductor design capability in the UK.

Our focus is advanced integrated circuit and electronic system design, with particular strength in low-power intelligent hardware, edge AI, digital design, analogue and mixed-signal systems, and compound semiconductor technologies.

We are building Novomorphic from the ground up. That means every person who joins us will help shape the company, its technical capability, and its culture. We value technical excellence, ownership, curiosity, collaboration, and practical delivery.

This is not a conventional graduate role. It is a structured industry development programme for a PhD-level engineer or researcher who wants to build deep expertise in high-performance motor drives, GaN power electronics and deterministic FPGA control.

You will help deliver Novomorphic's adaptive GaN drive and FPGA-based motor‑control platform, taking designs from system architecture and analysis through power‑stage bring‑up, closed‑loop control and full hardware validation.

The role is commercially grounded and hands‑on. It suits someone with strong research capability who wants to solve real engineering problems where safety, efficiency, control stability, pace and practical delivery matter.

You will work across the boundary between a three‑phase GaN inverter and the BLDC/PMSM control system that drives it. Your core focus will be inverter behaviour, gate drive, sensing, protection and motor‑control performance, with particular emphasis on FPGA‑based field‑oriented control.

Novomorphic must be expert in motor drives, but this role is not for detailed electromagnetic motor design. You will use motor parameters and motor‑twin outputs, diagnose real drive behaviour and work with separate FPGA/firmware, analogue and mixed‑signal, systems, PCB and motor‑domain specialists.

• Design, analyse and validate three‑phase GaN inverter architectures for BLDC and PMSM drives.
• Select and characterise GaN devices, gate drivers, DC‑link components and supporting power‑stage components.
• Define gate‑driver architecture, isolation, biasing, safe switching and shutdown behaviour.
• Optimise dead time while preventing shoot‑through across operating conditions and device variation.
• Analyse switching transients, ringing, parasitic effects, dv/dt, di/dt and common‑mode behaviour.
• Define and review EMC, gate‑loop, commutation‑loop and high‑speed switching layout constraints with PCB implementation partners.
• Estimate and measure conduction and switching losses, inverter efficiency and the practical benefit of GaN devices.
• Assess junction, case and board temperatures and support thermal design and full‑load validation.

• Define and integrate phase‑current, DC‑bus voltage and temperature sensing into the control platform.
• Specify ADC front‑end performance, bandwidth, filtering, scaling, isolation and signal‑integrity needs.
• Develop over‑current, over‑voltage, under‑voltage, over‑temperature, shoot‑through prevention, interlock and controlled shutdown behaviour.
• Plan and execute safe staged power‑up, low‑voltage testing, double‑pulse testing and progression to full‑load operation.
• Use oscilloscopes, differential probes, current probes, power analysers and thermal measurement equipment to debug real hardware.
• Investigate faults methodically and document limits, assumptions, test evidence and corrective actions.

• Develop and validate field‑oriented control for BLDC and PMSM machines.
• Implement and verify Clarke…