VLSI Interview Questions

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One day you are strolling the hallways in search of inspiration, when you bump into a person from the marketing department. The marketing department has been out surfing the web and has noticed that companies are advertising the MIPs/mmG , MIPs/Watt, and Watts/cm_ of their products. This wide variety of different metrics has confused them.

Explain whether each metric is a reasonable metric for customers to use when choosing a system.
If the metric is reasonable, say whether "bigger is better" (e.g. 500 MIPs/mmG is better than 20 MIPs/mmG ) or "smaller is better" (e.g. 20 MIPs/mmG is better than 500 MIPs/mmG ), and which one type of product (cell phone, desktop computer, or compute server) is the metric most relevant to. (NOTE: Justify your answers :-))

MIPs/mmG reasonable? [NO]
MIPs/mmG is measuring performance per area. Although we often make performance/area tradeoffs on a particular chip, the reasons for being concerned about area are based on manufacturing cost of the chip. Area by itself, is generally not a primary concern. There is one semi-plausible argument that could be made for the reasonableness of this metric. When looking at chips for cell phones, we could trade offsmall size and area, because the size of a cell phone is an important concern for consumers.

MIPs/Watt reasonable? [YES]
This metric is measuring performance per unit of power consumption. In a market segment that is concerned about both performance and power, this metric is of direct concern.
Which is better? [bigger is better]
Increasing performance and decreasing power consumption are both good things.
Most relevant product? [cell phone]
Of the three candidate products, cell phones are most sensitive to power consumption and are most likely to use MIPs as a measure of performance. Desktop PCs and compute servers generally use SPEC benchmarks for performance metrics.

Watts/cm_ reasonable? [YES]
This metric is measuring power consumption (or heat generation) per unit of volume. When heat generation is a concern, the primary concern is how much heat is generated per volume of space. There are three broad categories: no active cooling needed, air cooled (e.g. fans), liquid cooled (e.g. liquid nitrogen).
Which is better?
[smaller is better]
The less heat that is generated per volume of space, the less need there is for active cooling, and the more comfortable the temperature is.
Most relevant product? [server]
Cell phones generally don't generate enough heat to have this metric be of concern. Desktop PCs generally are not packed into a room so tightly that the volume of the PC is of concern. Compute servers tend to be packed into a rooms and on racks as densely as possible, so their volume and heat dissipation are of concern.
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  1. The questions which was given by you is very useful for me.So i need some more questions and answers to prepare for my career.
    ____________________________
    Vimal

    Sreevysh Corp

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