ECE 485/585

Microprocessor System Design

Lecture # 9
Possible Interview Topics Relating to ECE-485/585

Portland State University

1
 Lecture Topics
• Possible interview topics relating to ECE-485/585

2
 Possible Interview Topics
• Verilog:
• Know Verilog programming
• Different ways to model combinational logic using Verilog
• Structural (Primitives)
• Dataflow (Continuous assignments)
• Behavioral (Procedural blocks)
• Know how to model FSM (Finite State Machine)
• Memory operation
• SRAM
• DRAM: SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4
• Timing diagram
• Memory configurations
• What is tFAW and why tFAW is imposed?
• What is Burst Length and how does it work?
• Address mapping
• Memory scheduling
• What is page hit, page miss, page empty?
3
• DRAM refresh operation
 Possible Interview Topics (continue)
• Cache
• What is cache? Why use cache? Why cache works? (What are the
program characteristics that makes cache work – temporal and
spatial localities)
• What is cache hit and cache miss? How it impacts performance?
• What is write back cache? What is write through cache?
• What are the different cache design and how does each one work:
direct map, set-associative, fully associative cache
• What are the meta data for cache?
• What is victim line?
• Cache replacement policy such as LRU, etc.
• What are the different types of cache misses?
• What is the AMAT (Average Memory Access Time)?
• How to improve cache performance?
• What is blocking cache? What is non-blocking cache?
• What is inclusive cache? What is exclusive cache?
• What is trace cache and how does it work? 4
 Possible Interview Topics (continue)
• Cache coherence protocol: for example, how does MESI work?
• What is virtual memory? How does it fit into the overall memory
hierarchy?
• What is TLB? How does page table look up work?
• What is the advantage of using differential signals?
• Design considerations for bus design
• FSB design and operation

• Be able to talk thoroughly and fluently about your project and better
yet, do a demo to showcase your project at the interview
• Anything you put on your resume, you need to be able to talk about it