David Chisnall

David Chisnall is Co-Founder and Director of Systems Architecture at SCI Semiconductor, a company founded to make CHERI processors. He is also a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cambridge. His background spans compilers, operating systems, security, and hardware. He has been an LLVM contributor since 2008 and implemented two language runtimes that have each chipped on over a hundred million devices. He was elected to the FreeBSD Core Team for two terms. He joined the CHERI project at the University of Cambridge in 2012 to drive the languages and compilers track of a research project that aimed to change the entire hardware/software stack to improve security. In 2018 he moved to Microsoft, where he led their involvement with the UK Government’s Digital Security by Design programme, a £170M effort to drive CHERI adoption in the industry. As part of this, he created the CHERIoT project, an attempt to scale the ideas from the CHERI research down to tiny low-cost devices, giving bet