Basic Information

• Curriculam: BTech
• Name: Samar Perwez
• Current Year of Study : 4th
• Year of Internship: 3rd
• **Role during Internship **: Digital Design Engineer
• Duration: 2 months
• What kind of roles/companies were you primarily aiming for?: I was primarily aiming for core companies which are well-established and allow interns to work on insightful projects. For eg. Google HW, Nvidia, TI, Qualcomm.

  Motivations

  I am interested in Computer Architecture & VLSI and have done a variety of courses on them also; EE671, EE739 etc. TI best aligned with my expectations.

Resources

Personally, most of my preparation came from revision of basic courses in my 2nd year [EE204, EE309 etc.]. They are sufficient for core internships. The only additional concept not covered was STA (Static Timing Analysis) which had to be done externally.

Main Topics

My recommendation would be to brush up on fundamentals, most tests/interview focus primarily on them and clarity on the basics would be significantly helpful.

Selection process

Technical Test -> Interview [after 1ish week, 1 per role, 2 max] -> Offer

Road-blocks

There were some, being rejected by all day 1 companies, and then even rejection from Nvidia. Dealing with them basically boils down to just believing in yourself and keeping in mind that it is not your loss but rather the loss of the company in rejecting you. The hiring procedure is pretty gray and most decisions are made based on factors which are not necessarily within your control.

Work during internship

I was working in the Sitara MPU Design Verification team in the Embedded Processors division of TI. My primary project was automating the detection, analysis and mitigation of non-resettable elements in SoC design. It involved working with custom TI workflows and Cadence tools like Xcelium and Jasper.

Overall Internship Experience

TI has one of the best work cultures in the entire India-based semiconductor industry. Everyone treats you very well and are helpful. Interns are deployed on live projects with actual impact to TI. TI offers 1 week of hotel stay at the beginning and access to its socio-cultural club Texins with access to sports and gym equipment & facilities.

Networking opportunities

Yes, there are networking opportunities within your team & unit majorly. The director of our division also had a session for all the interns under him. In addition, we also had a networking dinner organized when the US product head visited Bangalore.

Reccomended or not

Yes, if someone is considering internships in core electrical domain, I would strongly recommend them to consider TI. It is a great place to work with an excellent culture. The projects offered are typically far better compared to its competitors. More importantly, TI-Bangalore owns its products end-to-end, which means that all parts of the project ranging from ideation & design to verification are done in Bangalore. This is unlike other companies in which US-based teams own a lot of the products. Such an environment allows for greater flexibility and also a greater quality of work done.

Advice

The internship season is very different from whatever you have done earlier. Academics was very simple, study -> give exam -> get good score -> get good grade -> win?. However, there is a lot of grayness in the corporate world, some decisions made which seem counter-productive and some are very surprising. Keep in mind that this has very little to do with you or your performance and there are a lot of factors which go into play. My recommendation would be to give it your best and then let it be. The companies which you obsess over may not be all that rosy inside and in fact when all of you come back from your internships, you will have wildly different views as compared to now.