HWE interview prep
Hi all, I am an Analog Design Engineer and I am thinking about switching over to HWE. How do I prepare for an interview for a HW engineering position? What are the topics that I would be tested on? TIA!
In PCB design they could ask any topic in EE. Few important ones : Signal and Power Integrity Voltage regulators- Linear, Switching, LDO Logic circuits Digital design questions Opamp based design Debugging and testing, use of test equipment Basic RLC circuits
Building off pcb topics from others: Understand FCC testing (radiation vs. immunity) UL testing ESD testing Understand types of diodes and how they might be used Understand PMOS vs. NMOS fet’s, understand a gate threshold voltage curve related to Vgs, and how to use the body diode What impacts thermal performance PCB stack ups Controlled impedance traces Single ended trace impedance Differential trace impedance Signal integrity: Transmission line reflections Bethesignal.com listen to Eric Bogatin talk Power integrity: be able to draw waveforms for an enable signal, the “switching” node before the inductor, the voltage rail after the inductor, know what a bootstrap capacitor does, know what a soft-start is, be able to understand feedback resistors, understand input & output capacitance calculations, understand inductor sizing, understand how capacitance changes with voltage bias. Know how to implement some basic communication protocols: SPI I2C NAND Flash DDR3 vs. DDR4 PCIe SATA Extra credit (probably not needed): Ethernet HDMI USB SGMII / RGMII Also, be able to describe the design process starting from a set of requirements until mass production.
By hardware engineer if you mean embedded systems, PCB design, you could watch the High Speed Digital Design workshop videos by Howard Johnson in Safari. I found it pretty useful.
PCB Design
Hi @Nvidia, I could only find the book that's written by Howard Johnson. Can you share the link of the workshop videos? Thanks!