The Hiring Manager sent an email asking about my availability. The job description was for configuring CAD tools according to requirements.

He went over my resume, especially projects related to VLSI. He wanted to know if I was familiar with the whole process flow of design.

He was also interested in knowing my knowledge of fabrication and asked questions based on how to reduce capacitance in interconnects (use a dielectric with low relative permittivity). He also asked a simple algorithmic question related to an IF condition.

He then scheduled two more interview rounds over call, with his team to assess my skills.

The first group asked questions about the basics of circuit design, such as:

• What are the advantages of using CMOS design and the necessity of both NMOS and PMOS?
• What is parallel computing all about (since that's on my resume)?
• How could I use MPI to optimize Cadence (this seemed a bit unusual)?
• If I minded doing a more software-based job.

The next team asked more relevant questions:

• What would be the delay if there was a resistance and a capacitance at the output of an inverter?
• What is body biasing?
• Did I know PERL scripting?
• Did I know SKILL (apparently that's the language they use to optimize their CAD tools)?
• How would I go about implementing a design process (schematic, simulation, floorplanning, layout, etc.)?
• Did I know UNIX (basics)?
• What is grep for?

Fabrication related, something about the interconnect process that I can't seem to remember.