Any pointers for Physical Design Interview with TPU team at Google. Anyone been through it and can please share ?
@google @intel @apple
Based on my interview with them 2 yrs ago, I think the TPU team outsourced a lot of work to external design service company.
Thanks for that. What kind of questions were you asked ?
Usual PD questions but more at higher conceptual level, like purpose of each PNR stages, correlation between stages and how to improve them, top level power domain (isolation at driving or receiving domain ...etc). Most of the interviewers don’t do hands-on work anymore so don’t expect many in-depth hands-on questions. Some guys might throw you circuit level questions to throw you off, and use this to reject you later if they think you are not ‘googler’ type
I got rejected too!
Can you let me know what the interview was like in general terms? Mostly undergrad level academic questions or more based on experience? What was your general opinion of the interviewers?
It will be a combination of academic questions and then your experience. They wanted to know my top 3 Physical Design domain strengths and then asked questions about those.
I know some of the TPU team in a non-professional capacity. #1 rule with google is: don’t overestimate them. They do everything at the academic undergrad level.
Does that mean they are more into Research ? Or try to do everything ground up
How they do things and how they screen may be very different. I don’t know enough to help much, but you can expect e.g. a basic cmos driver fan-out design question. Reality is they probably just hire for experience and likability like everybody else; the questions are an ice breaker.