Michael Schaffner
TPU Compute RTL Design Engineer at Google
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Schaffner is a hardware design engineer with nine years of experience specializing in RTL for secure accelerators and system-on-chip infrastructure, currently working on TPU compute RTL at Google in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has deep expertise hardening IP against fault injection and tampering, having owned fuse controllers, device lifecycle controllers, alert handling, memory scrambling, and top-level verification for OpenTitan and Google projects. A sustained open-source contributor, he’s implemented security-critical wiring, memory scrambling, and alert logic in the widely used OpenTitan root-of-trust project and improved automation and build flows across edalize and Ibex. His background includes a doctorate from ETH Zürich and postdoctoral work on near-memory computing and manycore research platforms, blending academic rigor with production silicon experience. Colleagues rely on him to run design reviews, sync cross-functional teams, and drive signoff processes that keep complex tapeouts on schedule. Notably, he pairs low-level hardware finesse with test and automation improvements, making both designs and toolchains more robust.
8 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Science Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Doctor of Science Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at ETH Zürich
English, Spanish, French, German
Github Skills (32)
hardware-designs10
verilog10
systemverilog10
risc-v10
yosys10
hardware-security-module10
hardware10
eda10
digital-logic10
vhdl10
verilator10
automation10
ghdl10
sys10
embedded10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
lowRISC/opentitan
Sep 2019 - Jan 2023
OpenTitan: Open source silicon root of trust
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer
Embedded Systems EngineerContributions:3 releases, 4455 reviews, 1709 commits in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Michael Schaffner's commits focus on implementing and integrating security features within the OpenTitan project, specifically related to the alert handler. His contributions involve wiring up and configuring various interrupt signals, incorporating memory scrambling, and ensuring the correct functioning of a multi-bit bus. He has demonstrated experience working with low-level hardware details by implementing a variety of improvements, fixes, and tests for the platform.
root-of-trustrootsilicontrust
lowRISC/ibex
Jun 2017 - Aug 2022
Ibex is a small 32 bit RISC-V CPU core, previously known as zero-riscy.
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / Automation Engineer
Embedded Systems Engineer / Automation EngineerContributions:38 reviews, 23 commits, 31 PRs in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on low-level hardware interaction and automated testing procedures. Their contributions involved fixing syntax issues for compatibility, specifically with Altera Quartus, which suggests working with hardware description languages. The user also updated and added features for lockstep core implementation. Furthermore, they updated code with inverted ECC codes.
risc-vcpuzeroibex32-bit
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