FPGA Design Engineering Intern - Summer 2027

Tell me about a project where you used an oscilloscope, a DC power supply, or a multimeter to debug a hardware problem. What did you see on the scope that told you something was wrong?

real bench-level troubleshooting experience, not just textbook knowledge of the tools

Tell me about a time you had to take a vague requirement or a half-finished spec and turn it into something you could actually design against.

ability to capture and clarify requirements, which the posting calls out explicitly

Tell me about a time a design review or a professor or teammate caught a mistake in your logic or code. How did you handle that feedback?

how they respond to correction in a technical setting, important for an intern working under a senior engineer

This role touches RF Site products for mission-critical communications, meaning public safety systems people depend on in emergencies. What does that responsibility mean to you when you're testing your own work?

whether they grasp the stakes of building for public safety infrastructure and take validation seriously

Walk me through how you'd write a VHDL or Verilog module for something like a FIFO or a simple state machine. What would your process look like from requirements to working code?

whether the candidate actually has hands-on HDL coding experience versus just classroom exposure to concepts

Say you're given a timing diagram and an interface spec for a new FPGA connecting to another digital device. How would you go about verifying that your design meets that spec before it ever touches a bench?

understanding of digital interfacing analysis and whether they think through simulation and verification before hardware testing

Have you written test scripts in Python to automate any kind of measurement or validation? Tell me what that script did and why you built it that way.

comfort with Python for test automation, a core part of the role's day-to-day work

How comfortable are you writing C code that has to talk to hardware, like reading a register or handling an interrupt?

whether their C experience extends beyond general software into embedded or hardware-facing code

What do you know about the difference between VHDL and Verilog, and do you have a preference? Why?

depth of HDL knowledge and whether they can articulate real tradeoffs rather than just naming both languages

If your FPGA design passes simulation but fails on the actual board, what's your first move?

a practical debugging mindset and whether they know the difference between simulation behavior and real-world hardware issues

Imagine your mentor hands you a new FPGA board with no documentation on one of the interfaces and asks you to figure it out. What do you do first?

initiative and troubleshooting approach when working under a senior engineer with incomplete information

If you were asked to document a device interface specification for someone else to pick up after you left, what would you make sure was in there?

attention to documentation quality, since the posting calls out documenting interface specs as a core task