First round was tough hiring manager call with resume questions and further deep questions and will kept digging even you don't know the concept. When you thought you were clearly out, HR will schedule a call involving salary relocation stuff just to keep you warm. Ofc HR was going to miss the promised deadline for updates and will not respond to your inquiry until the top candidate signed. Hr will then respond with a sincere ish email before ATS finally closing you out.
There were 5 rounds of interview back to back, each taken by a different interviewer. They asked about basics of RF design and analog integrated circuit design.
1. Noise figure questions
2. Smith chart questions
3. PLL
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Noise figure questions
2. Smith chart questions
3. PLL
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Qualcomm (San Diego, CA)
Interview
Apply on the website, make sure your plaintext resume is readable. Took them about 4-6 weeks to get back to me with a phone screening. I spoke with one of the directors of engineering. He was very nice/sincere and technically apt. Questions were pretty basic about IP3, smith chart, vswr, and how you would make measurements in a lab.
The on-site interview consists of 5 technical interviews about an hour each. Almost every interview asked to draw a RF front end architecture and draw/explain how a phase lock loop works. Expect questions about constellations, eye diagrams, RF design challenges, IP3, p1dB, smith chart, amp class biasing, analog RF filters (be perpared to draw elliptic, cheby, butterworth, etc), noise figure, etc. There are some esoteric terms which I was unfamiliar with such as gamma opt(optimum matching coefficient) and beta for FM (modulation index for FM). You really need to be able to answer questions on ALL of these topics. I'd say I aced 4 of the 5 interviews and did okay on one and wasn't offered a job, so make sure you know everything I just described inside and out.
There are no behavioral or situational questions. They seem to only care about what you know and not whether you'll be easy to work with. This is a bit disconcerting for people such as myself who have worked on a design team before and know the challenges of working with stubborn engineers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Be prepared to talk about stochastic probability density functions as they relate to signal theory.