Broadcom Coding Interview Questions
25 Broadcom coding interview problems with full optimal solutions — 8 easy, 12 medium, 5 hard. Every problem ships with multiple approaches (brute-force first, then the optimal), complexity tables for each, company-specific tips on what an Broadcom interviewer values, and a FAQ section.
Showing 7 problems of 25
- #1easyvery frequently asked
1. Two Sum
Find two indices whose values add to a target. Broadcom screens for this in early rounds to verify you default to a hash-map solution over a brute-force nested loop — a signal that you instinctively reason about time complexity for large-scale data pipelines.
- #3mediumvery frequently asked
3. Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters
Find the length of the longest substring with all unique characters using a sliding window. Broadcom asks this to verify sliding-window intuition — the same technique underlies congestion window management in TCP implementations embedded in Broadcom's network silicon.
- #4hardoccasionally asked
4. Median of Two Sorted Arrays
Find the median of two sorted arrays in O(log(m+n)) time. Broadcom asks this because binary search on implicit data structures is a core skill for their systems engineers — the same partition-finding logic appears in percentile computation for network latency telemetry and SLA threshold analysis.
- #72hardoccasionally asked
72. Edit Distance
Compute the minimum number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions to transform one string into another. Broadcom asks this classic DP problem because Levenshtein distance underlies error-correcting code similarity metrics and firmware diff-patching algorithms — both critical in Broadcom's over-the-air update systems for embedded device fleets.
- #127hardoccasionally asked
127. Word Ladder
Find the shortest transformation sequence from one word to another, changing one letter at a time. Broadcom asks this because it is shortest-path BFS on an implicit graph — the same technique used to find minimum-hop routing paths and convergence analysis in network topology recalculation after a link failure.
- #146mediumvery frequently asked
146. LRU Cache
Design a cache that evicts the least-recently-used entry when full. Broadcom asks this because LRU is the dominant eviction policy in ARP caches, MAC address tables, and route-cache entries inside Broadcom's switching and routing ASICs — getting O(1) get and put right is a real firmware concern.
- #200mediumvery frequently asked
200. Number of Islands
Count connected components of land in a 2D grid. Broadcom asks this because graph connectivity is foundational to network-topology discovery — the same BFS/DFS that counts islands maps directly to identifying isolated segments in a physical switch topology or VLAN reachability analysis.