Hardware Questions¶
I have listed some hardware technical questions that were asked in my interviews at Intel, Microchip, Qualcomm, and Microsoft below. With the academic and extracurricular experience to be a candidate for more technical positions when seeking my second internship, the average question difficulty rose accordingly. The answers to some of these questions can be found in the Hardware Reference page.
Seeking my first internship¶
- Difference between a latch and DFF
- Difference between a Mealy and Moore FSM
- Implement gates (AND, NOR, etc.) from 2:1 multiplexers
- Create a DFF with reset from a regular DFF
Seeking my second internship¶
- Draw and compare the waveforms for a latch and DFF
- How to select between a Mealy and Moore FSM
- Implement a buffer and inverter from a NAND or XOR gate
- Implement DFFs (synchronous and asynchronous reset, enable) and latch in Verilog
- Different types of power dissipation
- Different types of adders
- Hardware multiplication and alternatives
- One hot vs binary FSM state encodings
- Causes of inferred latches
- Applications of latches
- Causes and fixes for setup and hold time violations
- Causes and fixes for clock domain crossings; metastability
- Gray code applications
- SystemVerilog vs Verilog
- Purpose of for loops in SystemVerilog
- Transistors
- RC circuits
- Clock jitter, skew
- Setup and hold slack
- Draw a state machine diagram of an elevator (more details about the elevator's functionality were given)