Cisco Exam Pattern

Interview Section 
After clearing the written test, companies usually interview the candidates to gauge his/her capabilities and personality. Basically there are two kinds of  interviews, the techincal one, where stress is laid on checking your fundamentals in your core subjects and the HR one , where your communication skills and personality is put to the test.
Check out the following sections for more details

Technical Section

Human Resources (HR) Section

General Tips for the Interview

Group Discussion (GD)

Technical Section
As we are from computers and electronics branches, so for the moment we have information regarding core subjects of these fields only. As most of the companies coming to the campuses are from the IT industry hence you may expect them to probe your computer skills regardless of your stream. Knowledge of C is always an added advantage.
For Computer Students
For a computer student knowledge of C is essential. Other important topics include 

• Data Structures
• Operating Systems

Some students have also been grilled on Object Oriented Programming, C++ ,Microprocessor Architecture, Networking,  Database Management, Automata, Compiler Design and Computer Graphics depending upon subjects covered till the most recent semester.
Some Commonly Asked Questions

1. Usage of pointers and their fundamentals in C?
2. What is the difference between structures and unions in C?
3. Basic concepts about data structures like trees, linked lists, circular lists, queues, arrays
4. Sorting Methodology ( you may be asked to make an algorithm/program to implement a sort method).
5. What is an finite algorithm?
6. Basic concepts of Operating Systems such as multitasking, multithreading, real time systems, CPU  scheduling algorithms, deadlocks, memory management etc.
7. Difference between one pass and multipass compilers, compilers and interpreters, parsing etc.

For Electronics and Communication Stream
For electronic students the important subjects are

• Digital Circuits and Logic Design
• Microprocessor Architecture of 8085
• Electronic Design and Circuits
• Communication and Networking

Some Commonly Asked Questions

1. Difference between a latch and a flip flop
2. What is sampling theorem and why is it needed
3. Internal architecture of 8085
4. Comparison between OpAmps and transistors
5. Modulation techniques (AM ,FM , PAM etc.)
6. Transistor biasing methods ( fixed bias , emitter bias  etc. )

HR Section
In your HR interview ie human resources interview the main effort on the part of the interviewer will be to bring forth your true personality.They may ask you some routine questions , few of which have been mentioned below, but be expecting questions of varied type regarding sexuality ,music , authors etc. ; anything to get to know what you really are.

Some Commonly Asked Questions

1. Describe yourself
2. Why are you better than the next person
3. Your strengths and weakness and what you are doing to rectify your weaknesses
4. Information regarding what kind of work your parents do
5. The magazines and newspapers you read , their cost and at times their editors ; and that days headlines
6. You prefer a team sport to an individual sport
7. Why you want to join this particular company and not some other one.
8. What are your career objectives ( long term and short term )
9. Why you plan to switch over to software field ( for those who are from streams besides computers )

At the end of the interview they ask whether you have any questions to ask  them. It is better to stick to one or two questions regarding the company and not dwelve into how you performed or the pay package or any personal questions to the interviewer.


General Tips for the Interview
The Essentials
a) Fundamental principles pertaining to his academics ( most important )
b) Essentials of past life and clear cut career objectives
c) General awareness of world around him
d) In depth knowledge of your extra curricular activities
Apart from these in general keep the following in mind

• Always remember its a sort of formal occassion and never get too informal , like accepting interviewers offer for a smoke or drink
• Smart and clean turnout. Neat clothes and polished shoes with tidy hair.
• Be cool and don't get nervous.Try to be pleasant , alert and mantain eye contact. If u cant hold your own in technical questions try to remain composed ;your confidence may do the trick.
• Try to maintain a good rapport with the interviewer and get him to ask questions regarding the subjects you are strong in.
• Maintain eye contact from the begining and dont act in a manner so that the interviewer is distracted which for example can be caused by flashy dresses ,exaggerated arm movements or you shifting in your chair.
• Give them the impression that you are going to stay with the company for atleast 3 to 5 years. Never mention anything concerning GRE or CAT .
• Never try to bluff your way through an interview. The interviewers would be able catch on to it fast.

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Cisco Sample Test Paper

SECTION 1 -- BASIC DIGITAL SECTION    

1. In order to find out stack fault of a three input nand gate how many necessary input vectors are needed ?


2. What is parity generation ?

3. A nand gate becomes ___ gate when used with negative logic ?


4. What is the advantage of cmos over nmos ?


5. What is the advantage of syncronous circuits  over asynchronous circuits ?


6. What is the function of ALE in 8085 ?


7. A voice signal sample is stored as one byte. Frequency range is 16 Hz to 20 Hz. What is the memorysize required to store 4 minutes voice signal?


8. What will the controller do before interrupting CPU?


9. In a normalised floating point representation, mantissa is represented using 24 bits and exponent with 8 bits using signed representation. What is range ?

10. The stack uses which policy out of the following-- LIFO, FIFO, Round Robin or none of these ?


11. Where will be the actual address of the subroutine is placed for vectored interrupts?


12. Give the equivalent Gray code reprasentation of AC2H.


13.What is the memory space required if two unsigned 8 bit numbers are multiplied ?

14. The vector address of RST 7.5 in 8085 processor is _______.

Ans. 003C (multiply 7.5 by 8 and convert to hex)

15. Subtract the following hexadecimal numbers--- 84₁₆ - 2A₁₆

16. Add the following BCD numbers--- 1001 and 0100


17. How much time does a serial link of 64 Kbps take to transmit a picture with 540 pixels.


18. Give the output when the input of a D-flip flop is tied to the output through the XOR gate.

19. Simplify the expression  AB + A( B + C ) + B ( B + C )

20. Determine the logic gate to implement the foolowing terms--ABC, A+B+C

21. Implement the NOR gate as an inverter.

22. What is the effect of temperature on the I_cb in a transistor

23. What is the bit storage capacity of a ROM with a 512*4 organisation?

24. What is the reason of the refresh operation in dynamic RAM's ?


25. Suppose that the D input of a flip flop changes from low to high in the middle of a clock pulse.Describe what happens if the flip flop is a positive edge triggered type?

26. How many flip flops are required to produce a divide by 32 device ?   


27. An active HIGH input S-R latch has a 1 on the S input and a 0 on the R input. What state is the latch in?


28. Implement the logic equation Y = C^BA^ + CB^A + CBA with a multiplexer. (where C^ stands for C complement)


29.Equivalent Gray code reprasentation of AC2H.

30. What does a PLL consist of ?

We advice you to know the design of PLL as questions pertaining to this may be asked

SECTION 2 - SOFTWARE SECTION

1. The starting location of an array is 1000. If the array[1..5/...4] is stored in row major order, what is the location of element [4,3]. Each word occupies 4 bytes.


2. In a tertiary tree, which has three childs for every node, if the number of internal nodes are N, then the total number of leaf nodes are


3. Explain the term "locality of reference" ?


4. What is the language used for Artificial Intelligence

Ans: lisp

5. What is the character set used in JAVA 2.0 ?

Ans: Unicode

6. char a =0xAA ;
    int b ;
    b = (int) a ;
    b = b >> 4 ;
    printf("%x",b);

What is the output of the above program segment ?


7.  struct s1 { struct { struct { int x; } s2 } s3 }y;
How does one access x in the above given structure definition ?


8. Why there is no recursion in Fortran ?

Ans.  There is no dynamic allocation.


9. What is the worst case complexity of Quick sort?

Ans. O(n²)


10. What will be sequence of operating system activities when an interrupt occurs ?


11. In a sequential search, what is the average number of comparisons it takes to search through n elements ?

Ans: (n+1)/2.


12. What is the size of the array declared as double * X[5] ?

Ans.  5 * sizeof ( double * )


13. A binary search tree with node information as 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 is given. Write the result obtained on preorder traversal of the binary search tree ?

Ans : 53124768


14.  If size of the physical memory is 2³²-1, then what is the size of the virtual
memory ?


15.  S -> A0B
       A-> BB|0
       B-> AA|1
How many strings of length 5 are possible with the above productions?


16.  (3*4096+15*256+3*16+3). How many 1's are there in the binary representation of the result ?

Ans. 10


17. In memory mapped I/O how is I/O is accessed ?


18.  What is the use of ALE in 8085 ?

Ans  To latch the lower byte of the address.


19. If the logical memory of 8 X 1024 is mapped into 32 frames, then the number of bits for the logical address are____ ?

Ans. 13

20. Context free grammar is useful for which purpose ?


21. In ternary number representation, numbers are represented as 0,1,-1.(Here -1 is represented as 1 bar.) How is 352/9 represented in ternary number representation?


22. There are processes which take 4,1,8,1 machine cycles respectively. If these are executed in round robin fashion with a time quantum of 1, what is the time it take for process 4 to complete ?

Ans. 9


23. The minimum frequency of operation is specified for every processor because......
a)for interfacing slow peripherals
b)dynamic memory refreshing.
c)to make compatible with other processor.


24. For linked list implementation , which search is not applicable ?

Ans: Binary search.


25. Each character is represented by 7 bits, 1 bit is used to represent error bit and another bit for parity. If total number of bits transmitted is 1200 bits, then what is the number of symbols that can be transmitted ?

Ans: 133


26. Explain set associativity of cache ?


27. Write the postfix form of the following expression .
       A+[[(B+C)+(D+E)*F]/G]


28. What is the function of the linker?


29.  void f(int y)
       {
      struct s *ptr;
      ptr = malloc (sizeof (struct)+99*sizeof(int));
       }

     struct s{
        int i;
        float p;
               };

when free (ptr) is executed, then what will happen?



30. To concatenate two linked lists strings, the order is O(1) is obtained for what kind of list?

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