04 June 2003

Brain behind the BBC Micro and ARM wins Academy Award

Stephen Furber FREng FRS, ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester, has won a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for his pioneering development of new computer chip technologies. His early work paved the way for the formation of ARM Ltd, which now leads the world in 32-bit embedded microprocessor design. Professor Furber will receive his medal at the Academy Awards Dinner in London on Thursday 5 June.

Professor Furber's latest work is on asynchronous logic - designing unconventional computer chips that can lie dormant until they are needed, saving energy and giving more design flexibility. It could extend mobile phone battery life, make smart cards more secure and simplify the design of very complex chips. He also looks forward to a fusion of computer science and neuroscience over the next 20 years as computing engineers take more inspiration from the way human brains work. "I think this will be most useful in building machines that are much easier for us to use," he says. "They don't need anything like full human understanding to meet us part-way."

His original work at Acorn Computers Ltd was on the development of the hugely successful BBC Microcomputer. "The projection was to sell around 12,000 BBC Micros on the back of a BBC educational programme series," says Professor Furber. "In the end we sold over 1.5 million of them. The technology suddenly took off, just like the mobile phone boom in the 1990s. People found all sorts of uses for them that we'd never thought of. Of course the computer is a universal machine - it can do anything that you can turn into an algorithm."
He then went on to work on the development of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) chip. The RISC idea had come from UC Berkeley in 1980 as a way of building simpler microprocessors that left more room on the chip for memory and other functionality. Professor Furber led the design team that first commercialised the concept as the Acorn RISC Machine. ARM Ltd, the company set up in 1990 to develop and licence the ARM chips, now dominates the world market. Over a million ARM-based products are manufactured every day and 80 per cent of all mobile phones run on ARM processors.

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Notes for editors

1. The Academy's Silver Medals, instigated in 1995, are awarded annually to engineers aged 50 or under who have made outstanding contributions to British engineering. Only four awards may be made each year.
   
   
2. This year's other Silver Medals go to Andy Hopper FREng, Professor of Communication Engineering at Cambridge University; Dr Ian Mays, Managing Director of Renewable Energy Systems in St Albans; and Richard Williams FREng, Anglo America plc Professor of Mineral and Process Engineering, University of Leeds.
   
   
3. The Royal Academy of Engineering brings together the UK's most eminent engineers from all disciplines. They use their unrivalled knowledge and experience for the public good, giving independent advice to Government, supporting engineering education and research and encouraging excellence and innovation.
   

For more information please contact:

Lize King at the Royal Academy of Engineering

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