Ian Thompson

Software Engineer working on AI inference silicon

San Francisco Bay Area

About

I'm an electrical and software engineer in the Bay Area interested in firmware, driver, and FPGA development. I graduated from Cornell University with a Masters in Electrical & Computer Engineering. I particularly enjoy work that involves physically working with hardware, such as board bringup.

Experience

  • Member of Technical Staff at Etched
    Feb 2026 - Present · 6 mos

  • Senior Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
    Oct 2021 - Feb 2026 · 4 yrs 5 mos

    Developing presilicon, manufacturing, and early post-silicon software for Microsoft's Cobalt and MAIA programs as well as other custom silicon projects. - Architecting the software environment used for pre-silicon full-chip verification in server-grade compute and AI accelerator SoCs - Debugging complex CPU and SoC integration issues and root causing them - Architecting the functional test flows used during wafer and packaged part ATE in Microsoft's silicon products - Supporting silicon bring-up activities and enabling validation teams to achieve their test plans - Porting failing cases discovered in full OS environments back to lightweight pre-silicon environments for debug - Developing tooling to analyze raw scandump data and reconstruct CPU, fabric, and coherence protocol state

  • Software Development Engineer at Green Hills Software
    Jul 2017 - Sep 2021 · 4 yrs 3 mos

    Built drivers and frameworks for a secure smartphone OS

  • Graduate Teaching Assistant at Cornell University College of Engineering
    Aug 2016 - May 2017 · 10 mos

    ECE 4750 - Computer Architecture ECE 3140/CS 3420 - Embedded Systems

  • Architecture Intern at NVIDIA
    May 2016 - Aug 2016 · 4 mos