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AMD Senior Design Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

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Web: www.amd.com | HQ: Sunnyvale, CA

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Updated Oct 9, 2011 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 4 ratings

3.2

“Average” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 4 ratings

Positive	75%
Neutral	25%
Negative	0%

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3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Jan 2009 in Austin, TX (took a day)

onsite interview following phone interview

Interview Questions

there were none. All questions were very reasonable

Answer Question

Negotiation Details

not much was negotiable

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Apr 2011 (took 3 days)

They asked about my work and mainly touched upon the basics of digital circuit design, clock dividers etc.

Interview Questions

2L length transistor versus cascaded transistors. What is the tradeoff between performance and leakage.

Answer Question

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Jan 2007 in Sunnyvale, CA (took a day)

I submitted my resume through another company employee and it caught the attention of a manager who contacted me initially through the phone. He explained to me the project that he was hiring for and wanted to gauge my interest. We talked about potential responsibilities of the role and then arranged for an on-site interview.

The on-site interview took a little more than half-a-day. I was interviewed first by a more junior engineer who described to me the company culture and asked me some basic questions concerning chip-timing. I was then interviewed by a senior engineer, who later became my manager, concerning register files since I had mentioned on my resume that I recently worked on one. He wanted to gauge whether I had a large or small part in the design and whether I understood the most important concepts.

I was then taken to lunch by another senior engineer who told me why I should consider working for the company and the large scope of the project that I would be working on. He also conceded that on a chip this size, that my opportunities for vertical engineering (being involved in every aspect of the project from RTL, design, verification) and the number of block I would own might be more limited than at a startup but that the complexity of the problem was much greater than if I would join a smaller company.

I was then interviewed by the senior manager who contacted me. He asked me about computer architecture, specifically about the ALU Bypass loop (register file, bypass mux, comparator, adder) since I was involved in that area of design at a previous job. He also asked virtual to physical address translation which was also mentioned in part on my resume. This was followed by another interview where with another senior engineer who asked me to solve a tricky problem on transistor operating modes. Last, I was interviewed by a final senior manager about driving large loads through repeaters and how there was a useful upper limit on their sizes.

I was then escorted out of the building and told that a decision would be made quickly.

Interview Questions

How might all the different bit fields of the virtual address be used in the process of the CPU converting from virtual to physical addresses?

Answer Question

Negotiation Details

I was able to raise the amount of my base-salary by a little more than 5% after the initial offer. They seemed determined to hire me so I also insisted on about double the number of restricted stock units that were initially offered. Overall, I would recommend that people try to get multiple offers to give yourself more bargaining power but be ready to walk-away if the employer does not come close to your salary target.

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, an IQ/Intelligence Test, a Skills Test and a Background Check.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Oct 2007 in Austin, TX (took a day)

Hiring process not very complicated. Submitted resume to a Fellow at AMD who passed it along to the appropriate hiring manager. Background fit so I got a call and scheduled an interview.

The interview was long and VERY technical. I believe there 7 or 8 1 on 1 interviews, beginning with the hiring manager who just went over the basics and asked if I had questions. Then the fun began. One after another, 7 more people, all technical, interviewed me. The questions were basic, but you had to know your undergrad engineering quite well.

Some questions as I remember them:
1) Basics of inverter in/out curves
2) Logical reduction
3) Device stacking (pros/cons, tapering, total width)
4) device physics (nmos cross section, channel, saturation, DIBL)

Interview Questions

In saturation, the channel region pinches off well before the drain. How does current get from the source to drain then? (Since the channel is pinched off, it does not touch the drain)

View Answers (3)

Negotiation Details

Negotiation wasn't too bad. They wanted to know current salary, which I did tell them since the initial offer was only 2k more than current salary. In all, I got less than a 10% bump up in pay. It was mostly me telling the recruiter why I should be paid more.