Hello!
I am Geetesh Kini, a final-year undergraduate student in the EE department. I love eating ice cream, playing tennis, badminton, football, chess and Among Us. I’ve recently completed my 2-month hardware internship at Nvidia and would like to share my experience about the same.
I found this internship while exploring internship blogs from previous years. My interests are mainly signal processing and digital circuits & computer architecture, which made this internship one of the best options for me.
The selection process consists of an online test and an interview. The test consists of 2 parts: digital circuits and programming. The digital part is of numerical answer type and consists of questions related to flip-flops, static timing analysis including setup and hold time, pipelining, etc. So basically to crack this part, you need to be very thorough with flip-flops. In the programming part, there were MCQs based on C programming, especially pointers.
In the interview round, they asked me 4 questions, one was a basic flip-flop question, 2nd was related to how data flows in various stages when a pipelined microprocessor executes a particular instruction, 3rd was about writing an assembly code for performing a given task and the last one was a logical reasoning based question. I mainly used the IITB course material and GeeksforGeeks for my preparation and they were helpful.
The internship was a lot more chiller than I had expected. It was an 8-week internship. The first week was mostly reading and orientations by the HRs. Everything was new to us and the excitement level was at its peak. The actual work started in the 2nd week. The work given to me was related to retiming. So if the delay between two components of a chip is too long, we add flops (called retimes) between them to fix the delay. My work was to use Perl scripting to automate the generation of some files. These files would then generate the Verilog code for the retimes. It was a well-defined task that can be completed comfortably within 2 months, even if you’re new to Perl and Linux.
Finally, in the 7th week, we had our internship evaluation in which we presented our work to highly experienced managers. They asked me many thought-provoking questions and also provided me with valuable feedback. After the presentation, in the last 2 weeks, we just had to give the finishing touches to our work and we were free to do whatever want to do in the office. We played table tennis, pool, football and many other games. Our HRs also planned an entire day trip for us on the 2nd last day!
Nvidia also provided comfortable accommodation and a very positive work environment. My mentor and manager were both chill, and my teammates were approachable and helpful. We co-interns also shared a very strong bond as we all stayed in the same hotel. I also loved the climate of Bangalore. No humidity, and fresh cool winds flowing near the office were perfect for a walk when we needed a break. The two months of internship were two of the smoothest months that I remember in a while.
Overall, the internship was an amazing experience. I got to know how things work in a corporate firm, how many teams working in completely different areas coordinate effectively to work on the same large project, and how the concepts we learn in college are used with smart engineering techniques to make stuff that people use on a large scale daily, and how on an individual level, employees make sure to get things done on time and yet maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Remember that your work is just an aspect of the internship, the most important thing is to interact with as many people as possible. Get to know their work, what their team works on, and how their experience of working in the company has been, this will not only give you a thorough understanding of the industry, but also an idea about the variety of opportunities available in the domain, and whether you would like to work in it in the long term.
Last but not least, I would like to say that, internship season can be stressful with all the tests, and interviews, and missing out on an opportunity after all the hard work you’ve put in can be frustrating. But it’s also important to remember that every internship opens up the door for a new experience and an amazing one for sure! I wish you all good luck for an awesome journey that’s waiting for you!!
