I met one of the Synopsys' representative at the NC State Spring Career, where he collected my resume. First round was a telephonic interview, which was somewhere around 2 months after the career fair. Telephonic interview consists of questions on C++/ OOPs Programming Concepts, Scripting (Perl/Unix), VLSI Design (LVS/DRC), ASIC Design (Verilog HDL/non-synthesizable operations) and some current projects related questions.
For a Computer Engineering graduate student, the telephonic interview was really simple and straightforward. After 1 week I got a call for on-site interview.
The on-site interview had 3 parts: 1) Presentation on an upcoming industry trend (topic was given 2 days prior to the interview). 2) Group/panel interview 3) 1-to-1 discussion.
The presentation was limited to 30 minutes. Simple concepts, both technical and non-technical were asked during the presentation. During the panel interview, the entire team reviewed the resume and asked some questions from the projects done or the work experience. Also, some fundamental technical questions from VLSI and ASIC design were asked. Next, 3 members of the team interviewed me on technical and behavioral skills, it lasted for about 30 minutes. Lastly, there was a small discussion on the kind of role and responsibilities with the head of the group.
The entire on-site interview process took about 90 minutes.