How do you design scalability into your computer hardware designs?
Making your designs scalable is a critical skill needed for Cisco computer hardware engineers. Every type of technology will need to grow as it is used more or used for different applications. Building scalability into your designs is important expertise you will need to communicate to the Cisco interviewer if you expect them to hire you. You may want to provide an example of how you have done this in the past to illustrate your answer.
"When beginning a new computer hardware design, one of the factors I consider is how to make it scalable. This is important because it allows organizations like Cisco to use the same design as its use grows or the applications it runs expand. Methodologies I use to incorporate scalability into my designs include providing additional real estate on the motherboard, including provisional circuits that can be used later for additional memory and I/O, and creating extra expansion slots. It is much less expensive to do this during the initial design than to have to redesign a new system to accommodate the additional capacity."
