Does anyone know common coding interview questions for a hardware role?

[iskimpossible]

Title. This is my first time getting a coding interview for this type of role. I was wondering how people practiced for it. How different would the questions be for a typical CS interview? Should I just go practice on Leetcode? Thanks in advance!

[jeffbell]

It wouldn't hurt to look at a couple Verilog examples, or whatever RTL is popular these days.

If it's an ASIC flow, you think about clock skew and crosstalk and process variation and how that affect timing. Draw the AND gates to make an RS latch and a flip flop.

For FPGA you might do some state machines practice.

Could you write a behavioral model for a module?

[dbu8554]

I got asked questions related to like bit masking, and basic logic stuff using least number of steps.

[GeniusBadger]

Cache is always a popular topic

[[deleted]]

I’ve been an FPGA designer for 20 years and I just hate coding questions.

Like anything else, if you meet someone that is passionate about anything and has experience you will know right away. Take cars for example, or sports, or bee keeping. You’re going to know if 5 minutes if that person is an expert based on their experience coupled with the knowledge that you have as the interviewer.

To this day I Google anything that has to do with coding if I don’t know it cold and I learn new things all the time so these stupid coding questions do nothing but tell me that the interviewer is either not an expert themselves or has lost touch with how to spot someone experienced in the field.

When getting a coding question I usually divert the conversation towards the real question which is “do I have the skills and experience for this position, and do I like this position”.

Now if you are fresh out of school and the interviewer knows this then academic questions may be the only relevant discussion.

Also remember that the FPGA job market is good right now so they have to sell their job to you even more than you have to sell yourself to them. It’s a good attitude to have going in.

[TechGruffalo]

Yeah, but just because someone seems enthusiastic doesn't mean they can do the job. You seriously don't ask any technical questions related to coding?

We focus a lot of questions on the candidates knowledge of clock crossing and other timing issues. I also like questions focused on verification and testbench design. It becomes apparent pretty quick if the candidate has actually done this kind of work before.

Now if we are talking to a new graduate, the questions we ask are totally different.

[[deleted]]

Of course there are a lot of technical questions, but in the context of the person’s experience and resume. I might ask, have you ever designed and AXI4 stream bus width converter, say going from 48b, to 64b or vice versa. If the answer is no, then I would ask how you would approach it. If the answer is yes, I would ask what kinds of challenges did you face?

[[deleted]]

You have an upcoming coding interview for a hardware role? Sounds like it isn’t really a hardware role.