I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Bengaluru) in Sept 2017
Interview
I have appeared at Qualcomm for Physical design engineer this year. The first round was fully technical and consists GATE level questions. After written test 2 or 3 technical round followed by the written test.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most of the question asked from Digital electronics and VLSI, CMOS.
4 interviewers.
Basics of physical design /cpu architecture/experience based questions/tcl scripting/timing analysis/block closure /techniques/previous wrk exp/ drc analysis related questions/ tool related questions/ example
Based questions “how would you solve this?” Kind of questions
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Explain the challenges involved in previous tapeout
I applied online. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Austin, TX) in Sept 2025
Interview
One hour and loop with 5 people each round focusing on eache step of physical design flow and cadence tools. I have a thesis on RISC V low voltage pd so they asked about that more
Application via Qualcomm careers or referral.
Recruiter may reach out for basic screening:
Your background, tools used (ICC2, PrimeTime, RedHawk, etc.)
Areas of expertise: floorplanning, CTS, routing, STA, DRC, EMIR, etc.
Experience with multi-VDD, ECOs, hierarchical designs, colored flows, etc.
Technical Phone Interviews (1–2 rounds)
Each round typically lasts 45–60 minutes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Walk me through how you approach floorplanning for a block.
How do you handle placement of macros and standard cells around them?
What considerations go into designing a power grid?
How do you handle multi-VDD domains or level shifters?
What are tie-high and tie-low cells and where are they used?