Nigel Scales
Director at Hellcat Consulting Ltd.
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNigel Scales is a London-based director and seasoned consultant with over a decade running Hellcat Consulting and four years of focused SystemVerilog/UVM engineering on security-critical silicon projects. He combines hands-on test automation and back-end design experience—contributing to the prominent OpenTitan open-source root-of-trust project by debugging low-level control issues, building JTAG CSR infrastructure, and expanding test coverage for security state failures. Nigel’s background in physics from the University of Manchester informs a methodical, low-level systems mindset that excels at resolving subtle interface and enumeration bugs. Comfortable bridging consultancy, development, and security-focused verification, he brings practical experience delivering auditable, resilient hardware-software test frameworks.
4 years of coding experience
Bachelor’s Degree, physics, Bachelor’s Degree, physics at The University of Manchester
Github Skills (14)
security-testing10
verification10
testbench10
formal-verification10
jtag10
systemverilog10
hardware10
hardwareid10
test-automation10
csr9
uvm9
sys9
embedded9
rt8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (3)
lowRISC/opentitan
Oct 2021 - Apr 2022
OpenTitan: Open source silicon root of trust
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:158 reviews, 44 commits, 51 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Nigel primarily focused on addressing and resolving issues related to the OpenTitan project's low-level control and security features. Their work involved debugging and fixing fatal errors in virtual interfaces, specifically related to enumeration types. They also contributed to the development of the JTAG CSR infrastructure, implementing essential driver, register adapter and monitor components. Furthermore, the user was heavily involved in adding tests and integrating new sequences for comprehensive testing of state failures and other security counter measures within the lc_ctrl module.
root-of-trustrootsilicontrust
NigelScales/opentitan
Oct 2021 - Jan 2025
OpenTitan: Open source silicon root of trust
Contributions:774 pushes, 94 branches in 3 years 3 months
root-of-trustrootsilicontrust
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