I am a software engineer from the UK, working at Qualcomm (and Nuvia pre-acquisition) where amongst other things I'm responsible for pre-silicon software enablement covering application processor firmware, operating systems and virtual platforms on our custom CPU designs.

Prior to Nuvia/Qualcomm, I was the engineering team lead for Ksplice at Oracle which provides rebootless OS updates for Linux systems. I have a keen interest in CPU architecture and all things low-level. I have designed three CPU's - a RISC-V RV32IMA core, a x86 compatible and another home-grown 32-bit RISC, all with SoC reference designs.

My RV32IMA RISC-V core is implemented in SystemVerilog and offers ~2.61 CoreMark/MHz. The core implements the privileged architecture with SSTC and Sscofpmf extensions and runs mainline Linux. I implemented a number unique tracing techniques to record and replay execution to generate ELF core-files for software debug. The core is a scalar design with parallel execution units and out of order completion, register rename and dynamic branch prediction. The system runs on a Spartan 7 FPGA and has been hardened with OpenLane for the SKY130A process.

I have created an 80186 compatible IP core from scratch which currently runs at 60MHz on a Cyclone V FPGA in ~1750 ALMs, implementing the full 80186 ISA, traps, faults + interrupts along with a JTAG TAP. The core has a comprehensive test suite using Verilator + Google Test, a C++ model to verify against, and a build system using CMake+Docker. A reference design includes an SDRAM controller, MCGA graphics, PS/2 keyboard+mouse controller, fixed disk emulation on an SD card, lightweight PIC+PIT implementations and a BIOS. The system can run a wide range of DOS based applications with good performance.

See the rest of my projects on GitHub and more information on my personal website.