Beware of fake interview calls...

May peace and blessings of the Almighty be upon you all...

Recently, one of my students, forwarded a interview call letter and requested me to authenticate the genuineness of it. The crux of the matter is that, it was from industry giant Robert Bosch limited and it asked the candidates to deposit Rs.9400 as security deposit which will be refunded after the interview. 

On the first look, it appeared so genuine as it got email id in the name of bosch (jobs@indiaboschhr.com) and contained the postal address of Bangalore Bosch ltd. Even it had "confidential" prints on it and also it said "we don't use email ids apart from bosch ids" etc etc. Have a look at the interview call letter below. 

Fig 1

Fig 2

But, on a very careful examination,  one can find this as fake, 

• as the email id from which this mail was sent does not belong to HR department of Bosch. 
• The undersigned is not the employee of Bosch ltd. 

I request all those who are reading this to be aware of these fraud as they look so original. Regarding this a complaint was raised in cyber crime. Fine, how could one find these are genuine? 

• First, understand that, no genuine company calling for interviews within India will ask for security deposit even before the interview. 

• If you receive such bogus mails, search the company name, go to the company website and make sure the email ids of the HR department are matching. 

• Get the telephone numbers from the company website. Try directly calling to the HR department of the company and enquire about the email. Do not ever make a call to the numbers mentioned on the fake interview letter.

As I said above, utmost awareness is required in this regard, otherwise people will fall pray to this. Hence I request those who are reading this to create awareness amongst others. Sharing this article may help many more people. 

Thanks and Let us meet in an another blog post (God willing)

Your brother,

Aashiq Ahamed A

Speed Grade

May peace and blessings of the Almighty be upon you all...

Many of us come across SPEED GRADEs in SPLDs and CPLDs. Let us see how to define them.

For example, let us take a CPLD from Altera., EPM3128ATC144-10

Here the last two letters “10” is nothing but the SPEED GRADE. Usually speed grades are mentioned in “nano seconds”. Here it is 10 ns.

Defining Speed Grade:

We know that a typical CPLD contains two or more PAL-like Blocks (also called as Logic Array Block (LAB)). Each LAB contains a bunch of Macrocells. 

SPEED GRADE represents the propagation delay from an input pin on the MACROCELL to an output pin, assuming that the flip flop in the macrocell is bypassed. (This is because flip flops store the value at a particular point in time indefinitely).

To be more precise, let us see an example. Let us assume that we are implementing a AND gate (with inputs a and b, and output c) in the CPLD, EPM3128ATC144-10.

We should understand that, from the input a to the output c, the propagation delay is 10ns as per the selected CPLD. Similarly from the input b to output c the propagation delay is 10ns. See the above fig (taken from ALTERA Quartus II) to understand better.

Let us see another CPLD from XILINX, XCR3128TQ144 – 5,

This tells that the propagation delay is 5ns from the input pin on the macrocell to the output pin (i.e. from a to c and b to c). 

Hence, SPEED GRADE represents the propagation delay from an input pin on the MACROCELL to an output pin.

God willing, let us meet in an another blog post. 

Your brother,

Aashiq Ahamed A