---
title: "Akhil Kumar - Associate staff engineer in Greater Bengaluru Area | Tal"
description: "Meet Akhil Kumar, Embedded Firmware Engineer @ Samsung | PLDM Type 5/6 • Redfish RDE (BEJ) • OCP Firmware Recovery | MCTP • SMBus/I2C • CXL | C, ARM based in Greater Bengaluru Area. AI stack includes claude code."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/akhil-kumar-6/share-image"
---

# Akhil Kumar on Tal

## Headline

Embedded Firmware Engineer @ Samsung \| PLDM Type 5/6 • Redfish RDE \(BEJ\) • OCP Firmware Recovery \| MCTP • SMBus/I2C • CXL \| C, ARM

## About

I’m an embedded firmware engineer with 3\+ years at Samsung, writing C firmware for ARM\-based CXL devices\. I like owning a feature from the spec to the silicon: reading the requirements, designing the layers, implementing state machines and interrupt handling, then validating in simulation and on hardware\. What I’ve built: • PLDM Type 5 firmware update: all mandatory commands, a custom command, a seven\-state update machine and timeout handling • PLDM Type 6 Redfish Device Enablement: schema and resource\-tree design, BEJ encoding/decoding, vendor\-defined commands, multipart transfer • OCP firmware recovery: boot flows \(flash\-based, flashless, streaming\) and MCU–Caliptra integration, with hardware IP validation and test cases • DCU BIST framework: a 16\-instruction ISA and default BIST algorithms for DDR4/DDR5 testing Skills: C, ARM architecture, MCTP, SMBus/I2C, CXL, Redfish, Trace32, QEMU, FPGA\.

## Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

## AI stack

claude code

## Work experience

Associate staff engineer at Samsung Semiconductor, Mar 2025 \- Present · 1 yr 9 mos, Bengaluru, OCP Firmware Recovery: Analyzed the spec \(MCU–Caliptra integration; flash\-based, flashless, and streaming boot\), validated hardware IP flows, and wrote test cases\. PLDM Type 6 – Redfish Device Enablement \(RDE\): • Designed and implemented Redfish Device Enablement \(RDE\) for CXL devices over PLDM/MCTP/I2C\. • Enabled BMC\-mediated Redfish resource management without a device\-side HTTP/Redfish server\. • Developed mandatory RDE commands and vendor\-defined dictionary management commands \(VUCs\)\. • Conducted unit testing and functional validation of RDE commands and workflows\.

Senior Software Engineer at Samsung Semiconductor, Aug 2023 \- Mar 2025 · 1 yr 8 mos, Bangalore Central Business District, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, PLDM Type 5, Firmware Update: • Led end\-to\-end delivery of an out\-of\-band firmware update over sideband \(PLDM over MCTP on I2C\), letting the CXL device be updated without host or in\-band dependency\. • Designed and implemented an fw update state machine \(download, verify, apply, activate, etc\.\) with timeout and error recovery, plus multipart transfer for large images\. • Validated end\-to\-end with a BMC across update flows, command exchanges, and failure scenarios\. Direct Control Unit \(DCU\) : • Analyzed DCU specifications and developed detailed design documents\. • Implemented the 64\-bit DCU Instruction Set Architecture \(ISA\) with 16 instructions to execute programmable BIST patterns\. • Implemented vendor\-defined commands and 7 default BIST patterns, including MARCH\_X, MARCH\_C\_PLUS, and MARCH\_MATS\_PLUS, and implemented GIC interrupt handlers for errors\. • Performed firmware debugging and validation using Trace32 \(T32\), executing 15\+ test cases across BIST algorithms and interrupt scenarios\.

Intern at Samsung Semiconductor, Feb 2023 \- Jul 2023 · 6 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Teaching Assistant at National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Jul 2021 \- Jan 2023 · 1 yr 7 mos, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India

## Education

Master of Technology \- MTech, Data Analytics, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli

Bachelor of Technology \- BTech, Industrial Production Technologies/Technicians, National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, Haryana

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/akhil-kumar-6)

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