Hardware Interview Question and Answers

Hardware Interview Question and Answers
1)What is a Microprocessor?
Microprocessor is a program-controlled device, which fetches the instructions from memory, decodes and executes the instructions. Most Micro Processor are single- chip devices.
2)Give examples for 8 / 16 / 32 bit Microprocessor? -
8-bit Processor - 8085 / Z80 / 6800; 16-bit Processor - 8086 / 68000 / Z8000; 32-bit Processor - 80386 / 80486.
3)Why 8085 processor is called an 8 bit processor? -
Because 8085 processor has 8 bit ALU (Arithmetic Logic Review). Similarly 8086 processor has 16 bit ALU.
4)For a single computer processor computer system, what is the purpose of a processor cache and describe its operation?
5)Explain the operation considering a two processor computer system with a cache for each processor.
6)What are the main issues associated with multiprocessor caches and how might you solve it?
7)Explain the difference between write through and write back cache.
8)Are you familiar with the term MESI?
9)Are you familiar with the term snooping?
10)Describe a finite state machine that will detect three consecutive coin tosses (of one coin) that results in heads

Hardware designing interview Questions

1. Give two ways of converting a two input NAND gate to an inverter
2. Given a circuit, draw its exact timing response. (I was given a Pseudo Random Signal Generator; you can expect any sequential ckt)
3. What are set up time & hold time constraints? What do they signify? Which one is critical for estimating maximum clock frequency of a circuit?
4. Give a circuit to divide frequency of clock cycle by two
5. Design a divide-by-3 sequential circuit with 50% duty circle. (Hint: Double the Clock)
6. Suppose you have a combinational circuit between two registers driven by a clock. What will you do if the delay of the combinational circuit is greater than your clock signal? (You can’t resize the combinational circuit transistors)
7. The answer to the above question is breaking the combinational circuit and pipelining it. What will be affected if you do this?
8. What are the different Adder circuits you studied?
9. Give the truth table for a Half Adder. Give a gate level implementation of the same.
10. Draw a Transmission Gate-based D-Latch.
11. Design a Transmission Gate based XOR. Now, how do you convert it to XNOR? (Without inverting the output)
12. How do you detect if two 8-bit signals are same?
13. How do you detect a sequence of "1101" arriving serially from a signal line?
14. Design any FSM in VHDL or Verilog.
15. Explain RC circuit.s charging and discharging.
16. Explain the working of a binary counter.
17. Describe how you would reverse a singly linked list.