Basic Information

  • Curriculam: DD
  • Name: Shikhar Moondra
  • Current Year of Study : 4th
  • Year of Internship: 2025 summer
  • **Role during Internship **: Signal Processing and System design
  • Duration: 2 months
  • What kind of roles/companies were you primarily aiming for?: Core Electrical, Ai Reasearch/ Ai Development

    Motivations

    I enjoyed the signal processing course (Jaya Krishnan Nair) and Communication system (B.K dey) course, which made me intrigued as to how Signal processing is used commercially, although I had previous experience in Ai development, I knew, given the opportunity to pursue a systems role, I would take it

Resources

I brushed up my notes from EE 229, and Communication theory, at the time I was also looking for hardware engineering roles so I also used https://www.vlsi-expert.com/p/static-timing-analysis.html

Main Topics

I would suggest them to brush up their EE 229 notes, focus on sampling and system properties and reconstruction theorem other than nyquist ; Texas Instruments also often asks puzzles for systems role, so looking a few of them would also be a good idea DFT and FFT would be a great plus, although if you mention you don’t know those concepts yet, they won’t enquire you on those

Selection process

friday test => saturday results => sunday interview => sunday night interview results => Offer

Road-blocks

I was rejected in QRT research role (Interview), and samsung ai researcher role(interview); these were quite heart breaking honestly, but it happens that companies fail to filter you out , regardless of you caliber, the interview system is not perfect and the fact that there were many more companies to come (including TI) made me strive through it

Work during internship

I was provided with Frame images of hand gestures from UWB radar; my work was to perform literature review, choose and build 5-6 different Networks to classify the signals and while optimizing it for chip implementation (time and memory footprint)

This involved writing an entire library to convert the python weights and convert them into a C model, from scratch

Needless to say, it gave me a top of development for chip experience in C

Overall Internship Experience

My mentor was great, the timings were fairly flexible and I really feel I learned a lot of quantized implementations for neural nets, the Texins (recreation center) had a music room ; myself and 3 of my friends hung out there everyday, and it was a very enjoyable time

But in general, all the sports were usually packed, and it was difficult to get a badminton court for playing (example)

The food was decently priced and tasted good

The initial 1 week was in 5 star hotel, and it was absolute fantastic !

Networking opportunities

I networked a lot, with people from other college, but other than that, it was mostly me and my mentor ; so not much I guess

Reccomended or not

I would recommend it, but if possible, I would suggest people to look for Core signal research for more exposure, the projects are a bit random and it can’t be predicted, whether the project you get will be pure signals, or some thing else

Some teams (my team), take another interview, before the end of the internship. That interview plays the big role in the PPO offered

As a DD student, I was given a choice to join, by mailing after a year, so that kind can be given, one of the few companies that provide PPOs for Dual degree students.

Advice

Prepare like you won ; Perform like you never lost