I applied through an employee referral. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Santa Clara, CA)
Interview
I applied online and had an in-person recommendation from someone who works at the company. They emailed me to do 2 rounds of technical phone interviews. The interviewers were really nice and helpful. The interviews were about the courses I took in graduate school (I am on my way to PhD by the way), about Probability, Detection/Estimation Theory, Wireless Communications and Signals and Systems. Most were basic things, like definitions of simple things like fading, stability of a filter and so on. I was asked to do some computations on detection in Gaussian channel like error probabilities and detection regions. I was also asked some brain teasers like coin weighing problems. Then I was asked to do an additional third round of interview with similar problems. All the interviewers were nice and helpful.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I more or less knew what the interview would be like, so there was no unexpected question. I guess the problem I had the most difficulty was the brainteaser, a coin weighing problem with faulty coins. You have N coins out of which one is heavier. How many uses of the scale do you need to find it? The second part, now you don't know if it is heavier or lighter. How many uses of the scale do you now need to do? Then you need to relate this to a problem in information and coding theory.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Santa Clara, CA) in Dec 2012
Interview
I had a phone interview. The interviewer was nice and tried to help my answers. The questions were basic and not so difficult to answer as listed below:
1. Explain about your most recent work.
2. How would you estimate the time of arrival of a waveform.
3. Explain about coherent bandwidth
and some more questions I do not remember now. Although my application was rejected immediately due to my poor answers, the interviewer gave me a lot of encouraging comments.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you estimate the time of arrival of a waveform.
A desirable answer might be to say "apply correlator".