Imagination Technologies Hardware Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied and was contacted by a recruitment agency about a hardware design position in the PowerVR group. A Skype interview was set for two weeks after my application. The first Skype technical interview was a 1-hour call focused on DSP design. It included a brief resume review and some simple exercises needing basic hardware design knowledge and logic. The interviewer was relaxed, and it was a smooth experience. The recruiter contacted me two hours later to schedule a second technical interview for the next week. The second Skype technical interview was a 2-hour call with two interviewers. After reviewing my resume again, I was asked to implement a FIFO with simultaneous read/write using single-port RAMs. I explained my thought process and asked for guidance, but after an hour, I couldn't get a working implementation. Then, I was asked to complete an incomplete timing diagram for a given system. It seemed like a trivial exercise but wasn't well-described. I asked for clarification, and based on their answers, I spent an hour trying to solve it. I re-asked the initial question, and they gave a different answer, after which I solved it in 5 minutes. A week later, the recruiter said I was close but didn't get the job due to the second technical interview. They mentioned Imagination Technologies would consider me for a verification role in the same team without more interviews. Three weeks later, I was asked to do an online test, which was a very simple multiple-choice test on binary conversion and logic gates. The next day, I was asked for another technical interview, which I declined because I was disappointed with the latter part of the process. Looking back, I'd probably apply through the company website for direct feedback from Imagination Technologies HR.

The application process was quite fast maybe because they were hiring a lot of hardware design engineers then. I applied online on 10/01/2017. About a week later, they got back to me asking for more personal info and my UK work eligibility. Another week passed, and they sent me a link for an online test on digital circuit design fundamentals. Two weeks after that, they emailed me asking when I could come for an interview in Bristol. The interview itself was pretty chill. Just two interviewers, the head of the Bristol office and a senior hardware verification engineer. It was my bad for not prepping for the technical questions since I figured it'd be a general interview about personality and teamwork. It turned out to be a pretty technical interview, though. They hit me with questions about D flip-flop circuits, like setup time, hold time, and output propagation time. The answers are all over Google. It was a good experience to start my job search.

I sent in my application online through their site. About two weeks later, they got in touch via email to set up a phone interview. This call involved questions about why I picked Imagination, what I've been studying at uni, and some stuff about MIPS architecture, pipelining, interrupts, and C linked-lists. Soon after, they scheduled a face-to-face interview at their main office. This part had tougher questions, especially the really low-level ones, like designing logic counters and making an XOR gate just from NAND gates. They're not necessarily looking for perfect answers, but rather people who try to figure things out instead of just saying they don't know.