AI Hardware Verification Intern Review

Debugging testbenches and module level testbenches. A lot of time spent reading module specifications to usderstand what is being debugged then looking at UVM transaction logs to find the source of a bug or looking at the timing diagrams for the signals of a module to find the source of a bug then communicating this to a designer. Writing some tests for certain modules as well as carrying out some coverage reviews.

I learnt about formal and functional verification, fault injection, what UVM is and how it works, learnt some System Verilog and how it differs from verilog. Improved my proficiency with Linux and improved my ability to read documentation and analyse code. I also learnt about the design flows used in industry and the different EDA tools used.

Wrote documentation for a testbench qualification flow that will be used by the team. I also worked on real tests and testing for test benches and modules. These we modules that were being worked on by other verification engineers in the team. Not a huge amount of responsibility but this absolutely made sense since this isthe first time I had ever done verification and there were so many new things to learn.

A good amount, co-workers were very friendly and my manager was always willing to have a conversation about my work and answer any question I had. I did this internship online during the first covid lockdown. I started with only weekly meetings with my manager but moved to daily. Meaning the team was willing to give time to help me.

Very hard to guage since I did my placement online. Coworkers we very friendly and a few proactively asked to meet me over the phone which was appreciated.

I really enjoyed it, if you are curious about the hardware design I would absolutely recommend it. I learnt a huge amount in only 3 months and its allowed me to make more informed decisions about my career as well as providing me with valuable experience to leverage into other positions. It was also very exciting to see concepts I'd learnt at university applied in actual technology.

Yes

Talk to them at careers fairs, keep your CV to one page and put relevant projects on it, know what they do, know whats required of the postion on the job postion, brush up on any subjects you think might be relevant to the position for the interview. For verification, look at digital design and hardware description languages, object-oriented programming, algorithms, do some preliminary research into hardware verification. Mostly just have fun and try to always learn something from the interviews.