Arm
Cambridge
I spent six months on placement at Arm, within the team that builds large-scale hardware prototypes used to test new chip designs before they're manufactured. These prototypes let engineers check that new systems work correctly months before physical silicon exists, saving significant time and cost. My work centred on two projects. The first involved getting a debugging tool working and integrated on a new hardware platform, so software engineers could capture detailed information about how a chip behaves while running, and involved some more advanced work with moidfying the clocking architecture. The second involved building a way to read data out of a chip's permanent memory during testing, without disturbing the rest of the system. Both projects meant working across hardware, software and testing environments at once, and collaborating with engineers in the UK, France and India. Over six months I moved from learning how existing systems worked to independently diagnosing and solving problems that hadn't been solved before, and documenting my work so future engineers could build on it.
I joined Arm's Solutions Engineering FPGA team, which builds and maintains large hardware prototypes used to validate new chip designs ahead of manufacture. My role changed substantially over six months: I started by learning the team's existing tools and workflows, then took ownership of two engineering problems. The main one was bringing a trace-capture debugging tool onto a new hardware platform. This meant modifying hardware design code, build configurations and supporting scripts, then proving the whole system worked end-to-end rather than just checking that individual parts passed in isolation. I worked with engineers in other offices to track down where compatibility broke down, and validated the fix myself once found. Alongside this, I built a mechanism to read a chip's secure, one-time-programmable memory during simulation testing, to support the team validating boot software. I also took responsibility for documenting both pieces of work, producing diagrams and reference pages, and presented my progress to the wider team through the placement.
- Hardware description languages (RTL) and editing production hardware designs - FPGA build flows and generated-hardware hierarchies - Digital design concepts: clock domains, timing, trigger logic - Debugging across hardware, simulation and runtime software layers - Systematic, hypothesis-driven fault diagnosis in multi-layer systems - Reading and adapting existing scripts and build tooling - Working with memory interfaces and low-level data addressing - Technical documentation and architecture diagramming - Presenting technical work to engineering audiences
- Clear, evidence-based communication, distinguishing what's proven from what's still assumption - Working effectively across teams in the UK, France and India with varying levels of project context - Prioritising and managing two projects running in parallel - Knowing when to investigate independently versus escalating to a more experienced colleague - Writing documentation for readers unfamiliar with my specific work - Giving a technical progress presentation to the wider team - Building relationships through informal networking across the wider company - Taking ownership and initiative on problems without a predefined solution