Hiring Process

The hiring process has three telephonic interviews. These are usually taken by managers and senior design engineers in the team. There are no 1:1 interviews for intern positions. The interviews were not grilling.

Basic digital design questions included:

• Set up and hold time violations and how to fix those violations.
• Delays in ICs.
• The overall design flow of an IC.
• Some concepts of low-power implementation.
• A sequence detector / state machines.
• How to size transistors in actual IC design involving many transistors (not the logical effort in textbooks).
• Design of flip-flops.

I was also asked about my projects listed on my resume.

How will you size the transistors in the real world, which involves many transistors? Not the logical effort sizing found in textbooks.

Given a condition of IC tape out tomorrow, which one will you fix first: a setup time violation or a hold time violation? Explain the reason for your choice.