Basic Information
- Curriculam: DD
- Name: Harsh Sanjay Roniyar
- Current Year of Study : 4th
- Year of Internship: 2025 Summer
- **Role during Internship **: Hardware
- Duration: 9 weeks
- What kind of roles/companies were you primarily aiming for?: I was aiming for roles related to either digital or signal processing in core, or software engineering roles.
Motivations
I was aiming for roles related to either digital or signal processing in core, or software engineering roles.
Resources
For hardware roles, I revised my notes for EE671 primarily and then my notes from EE224 and EE309, and practiced some questions on STA from the internet.
Main Topics
Revising course notes of EE671, 224 and 309 should suffice. If in case the student has not taken 671 yet, he can refer to the notes and references on EE Course Drive.
Selection process
The technical test was fairly straightforward. The duration of the test was 90 mins, and we had to choose while attempting the test if we will answer CS questions or Digital questions. Aptitude and Programming questions were mandatory. After this test, interviews were schedule after some time in which for my profile I was asked basic processor questions related to performance, power and physical design. The interview lasted for around 30 mins, after which a short HR round was conducted. Roughly, within a week the PT Cell confirmed my selection. The offer letter from the company was finally received in the first week of April.
Road-blocks
I gave interview for Texas Instruments as well, but was not selected. To deal with not getting selected is to focus on what went wrong, and improve your preparation, technically as well as your communication skills.
Work during internship
I was in the CPU Physical Design Team and my responsibilities involved optimizing parameters to reduce power consumption and also physical design of a component inside the compute unit.
Overall Internship Experience
The experience was good. The work culture is very good and everyone in the team is collaborative and friendly. The biggest positive was getting to know the workflow of chip development from coding, to designing and then testing, benchmarking. As such everyone works on a small part of the whole pipeline, which we got to observe closely.
Networking opportunities
In our team, the interns were from IITB only, so not much to network with them, but there were some employees with which we were able to connect and discuss regarding their experiences.
Reccomended or not
Yes, I would certainly recommend this internship to others interested in VLSI and processor design. What I observed is that, at Qualcomm the tasks given to us made us directly involved with their chip development process, and we got to actually observe how this is done at an industry level and not limited to just what we learn via courses like EE671. Thus, I would strongly recommend others interested to consider it.