Chris Kay

Senior Software Engineer @Arm

My current position at Arm is on the Trusted Firmware-A team, with a general focus on the build system, continuous integration and other Release Engineering and DevOps-related areas. In this role I have driven and continue to drive the introduction of modern, low-friction solutions to address new and persistent technical debt in the development process of multiple trustedfirmware.org projects. This includes the creation and transition of new and existing build systems to modern CMake, the successful deployment of Conventional Commits within the trustedfirmware.org ecosystem, and substantial automation of the TF-A release process to dramatically reduce the person-cost of release deployment and automate KPI collection for project management. My final involvement with firmware development in this role was with the bringup of Arm\'s Max Power Mitigation Mechanism (MPMM) feature on Trusted Firmware-A - a microarchitectural feature used to identify viral load patterns and throttle core performance in order to reduce and optimise power consumption of the system. Prior to joining the TF-A team, I worked on the Arm SCP-firmware project - Arm\'s power management processor firmware for Reference Design and Total Compute systems, as well as its application-class development boards. It was during this period that I was involved in the prototyping, validation and implementation of Arm\'s reference System Control and Management Interface (SCMI) implementation from its inception - and for several years after - which now represents the core interface for power, clock and sensor information communication between the System Control Processor (SCP) and both the operating system and the secure-world application processor firmware (e.g. Trusted Firmware-A). I also lead Arm\'s internal Rust Special Interest Group, and more recently the Release Engineering SIG for Arm\'s OSS firmware division.