Hardware architecture interview questions

• Are you familiar with the term MESI?
• Are you familiar with the term snooping?
• Describe a finite state machine that will detect three consecutive coin tosses (of one coin) that results in heads.
• In what cases do you need to double clock a signal before presenting it to a synchronous state machine?
• You have a driver that drives a long signal & connects to an input device. At the input device there is either overshoot, undershoot or signal threshold violations, what can be done to correct this problem?
• For a single computer processor computer system, what is the purpose of a processor cache and describe its operation?
• Explain the operation considering a two processor computer system with a cache for each processor.
• What are the main issues associated with multiprocessor caches and how might you solve it?
• Explain the difference between write through and write back cache.
• What are the total number of lines written in C/C++? What is the most complicated/valuable program written in C/C++?
• What compiler was used?
• Have you studied busses? What types?
• Have you studied pipelining? List the 5 stages of a 5 stage pipeline. Assuming 1 clock per stage, what is the latency of an instruction in a 5 stage machine? What is the throughput of this machine ?
• How many bit combinations are there in a byte?
• What is the difference between = and == in C?
• Are you familiar with VHDL and/or Verilog?