Interview questions

1. Analog
There will be a written test. Mostly what we studied in GATE. RLC, Control systems, DSP, basic Opamp, Basic
transistor circuits, EDC.
Aura asked basic questions from Razavi in written test.
Intel asked basic digital design questions too. Like design a 4 bit pattern detector.
Texas Instruments asked what was written above and Aptitude.
Freescale asked basic transistor circuits and some digital circuits.
Analog interviews
There will be lots of R,L,C questions. Transient and steady state. Charge sharing between capacitors. Connecting
a voltage source to the ends of two capacitors that are already charged and finding the voltage at the middle node
is a favourite question of interviewers.
Then the whole of Razavi. Minimum study until chapter 10.
They may ask some DSP questions also.
If the project is relevent, they may ask from that too.
2. Digital
Written test may contain Aptitude, Basic digital (Gate level. Morris mano), some timing questions-setup, hold
etc, C code. Qualcomm asked Data structure questions also. Questions of MOS VLSI from Rabaey will also
come.
Digital Interview questions
Basic digital using logic gates. Some tricky questions on mere logic gates. You should be prepared to design a
FSM in front of the interviewer. Inverter questions from Rabaey. Lots of inverter questions. Go through as much
chapters as possible from Rabaey. Most important ones are those that are taught in class.
PD Lab questions will also be asked. They just ask you to explain the Physical design Flow. For that just go
through the wikipedia page of Physical design. Qualcomm asked PD Lab questions.
Nvidia asked Computer architecture. They wanted people who are good with coding and digital design.
3. Software companies
High paying companies take written test that contain both aptitude questions as well as coding questions.
Aptitude may include Data Structure questions also. Coding will be C or C++. Your choice. In general, what are
asked are string manipulation questions. Reversing the string, Finding the number of occurance of a particular
word in a string etc. To practice, go through http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ and practice string questions. For
data structures study the data structude book by Narasimha Karumanchi.
Software Interview Questions
Puzzles will be asked, May aks your favourite algorithm, concepts from operating systems may be asked. Data
structure questions may also be asked.
In IIT Kanpur, students complained that the questions asked in Qualcomm written are irrelevant to VLSI and so
they couldn't clear it. So the interviewers allowed walk in interviews for all VLSI students and took one.
CGPA.
Many companies don't ask for any CGPA. If you clear the written, You will get interview. If you do well in
interviews, you will get the job. In general, the bare minimum cutoff would be 7, I think. Only cypress asked for
8. Lots of VLSI and Software companies will have 7 cutoff. Some will have none.
Earlier, VDTT was considered a seperate department and VLSI companies used to come in parallel with
Electrical Department companies from Day 1 itself. This year, they put VLSI companies under electrical
department. So High paying Software companies like Flipkart were given first few day slots. VLSI companies
were pushed back. By the time the companies came to IIT Delhi, they had already recruited from other IITs.
Some companies did not even come here as the slot was a lot late.