I applied online and within a week, I received an email for a phone call interview the next day. There were two 30-minute phone interviews on consecutive days. Afterward, they invited me for an onsite interview. There, I had almost seven rounds.

Phone call interview:

• What is a static data type?
• What is a volatile data type?
• What is a structure?
• What is a Union?
• Memory address space structure.
• What are processes?
• What are threads?
• Inter-thread communication.
• Inter-process communication.
• Interrupts.
• System calls.
• Stack region.
• Where are global variables stored?
• What is a mutex?
• What is deadlock?
• Atomic operation?

Questions related to DDR2:

• How to identify read and write waveforms?
• How did you code for center-aligned strobe while writing data?
• Blocking and non-blocking (Verilog).
• How are latches generated?
• Why is synchronization needed between the controller and SDRAM, and how did you achieve it?

Onsite:

First round was scripting. The interviewer brought some code and asked me to explain its operation. Then, they showed me the content of a file and asked me to fetch lines that start with "#define".

• What is deadlock?

Second round was memory structure. How data gets stored in memory. Bit-level C programming.

Third round: They asked me questions about global and local variable scope by showing some code. Then, type casting related questions/coding.

Fourth round was longer. We went to the cafeteria and brought food back to the room. They didn't even let me eat properly, and I didn't finish half my plate. They kept asking me questions for the next four rounds. This round focused on DDR and bit-level C programming. How to design a number divide-by-5 operation in hardware?

Fifth round was on data structures.

Sixth round was on verification and C++. What is formal verification? Random constraints? Assertions? Design the malloc function. I was not prepared for verification at all. This was the reason for my rejection, although I performed well in all other rounds.

Seventh round was on computer architecture. Pipeline, virtual memory, cache. Ideally, what should be the block size?