Chick Markley
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChick Markley is a seasoned software engineer based in Berkeley with 18 years building and hardening software-defined hardware toolchains and systems, chiefly using Chisel and FIRRTL for RISC-V SoC work. He has deep backend and test-automation expertise—improving compiler passes, adding robust unit tests, and enabling Treadle-backed unittests to make hardware designs verifiable. At UC Berkeley and later SiFive he drove hardware-generation tooling and CI/CD improvements, including migrating Chipyard’s pipelines to GitHub Actions and slimming builds for better caching. His language fluency spans Scala, Java, Python, Ruby, and C across both small projects and large production systems. Long-tenured experience from academia to industry gives him a pragmatic perspective on reproducible hardware/software engineering and developer workflows. A not-obvious strength is his knack for refactoring testing and build infrastructure to reveal latent issues (e.g., cyclic module loops) before they hit silicon.
18 years of coding experience
37 years of employment as a software developer
Arts Bachelor, Physics, Arts Bachelor, Physics at University of California, Berkeley
Stackoverflow
4,041reputation
76kreached
155answers
2questions
Github Skills (38)
github-ci10
test-driven-design10
testing10
cd10
bash10
firrtl10
intermediate-code10
cicd10
scala10
automation10
compiler-compiler10
digital-design10
intermediate-language10
ci-cd-pipeline10
pipeline10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
chipsalliance/chisel-template
Feb 2016 - Mar 2022
A template project for beginning new Chisel work
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 review, 47 commits, 25 PRs in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Chick primarily focused on testing and refining the Chisel module template. Their work involved modifying and expanding unit tests, migrating test frameworks from HWIOTesters to iotesters, and updating dependencies. The user made improvements to testing methodologies by switching to a more tutorial-like style and by enhancing test coverage. They also incorporated features like VCD generation into the testing workflow.
chiseltemplatebeginning
chipsalliance/chisel
Dec 2015 - Jan 2023
Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
Role in this project:Backend Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:7 releases, 127 reviews, 486 commits in 7 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Chick's contributions primarily centered around enhancing the testing infrastructure and verifying the behavior of Chisel hardware designs. The user added and modified test cases to ensure the correct functionality of components, specifically focusing on the direction and clonability of `DeqIO` and `EnqIO` interfaces. Their work also extended to providing mechanisms to facilitate more robust testing, by enabling the use of the Treadle backend for unittests. The user's work demonstrates strong skills in test design and writing.
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