Top skills recommended for Advanced Micro Devices Software Engineer interview Insights by AmbitionBox
software system designer 2 Interview Questions
If [the team] is in China, I can speak Chinese on the phone, but we mainly communicate through emails. If we can find some common time, we will have a conference, but otherwise, we work with emails, since there will be the turn-around time. I go to sleep, and they work; they go to sleep, and I work. Sometimes it will delay the schedule. Nowadays, that’s a little challenging for me.
In choosing your career, first, you have to like it. If you don’t like it, you’re going to suffer through it. In this field, it’s not like you’re doctors, who build up experience. The older you are, the more valuable you are. In engineering, it’s not like that. You have to keep learning, so you have to stay curious. As Steve Jobs said, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” Keep your curiosity going. If you’re like “I’m tired of learning,” then you will be left behind. Technology is developing so fast.
For sure, you have to keep learning. For example, when I was in college, hardware design was drawing the circuit, making the boards with resistors and capacitors, and then connecting them into a circuit. But these days, it’s on the computer; you can make designs and simulations all on the computer. A lot of things I learned in the past aren’t in use anymore. You have to learn the new technology to keep up.
In the engineering world, there are always times when you’re like “why doesn’t this work?” You have to debug code and get it working, so there is a lot of cycling through those processes. And nowadays, when the team is getting bigger and bigger, you have teams overseas in China or other countries. You have to have time to engage in conferences with them, especially when you work with a team overseas. It’s hard to see where they are, and the coordination is challenging, especially when there’s a time zone difference.
I work at AMD, a company that makes computer chips. You know how before a hardware chip is taped out, it needs to be verified to make sure the functionality is correct? What I do is the verification of the hardware chip. However, it’s not really like I’m working on the real hardware. Nowadays, the hardware design and verification are more like software, so even making a circuit and writing Verilog code is still like programming code. Then, there are tools to translate Verilog code into the circuit, and we just make a simulation on top of it. I am not really touching the real hardware at this stage. Only when the chip comes back from the factory, is put into the board, and brought to the lab is when the engineers really touch the hardware to see whether it’s working.