Steve Furber
Stephen Byram "Furbie" Furber,
FRS,
FREng,
CEng (born
1953 in
Manchester, England) is the
ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at the
School of Computer Science at the
University of Manchester but is probably best known for his work at
Acorn where he was one of the designers of the
BBC Micro and the
ARM 32-bit RISC
microprocessor.
Furber was educated at
Manchester Grammar School and represented the UK in the
International Mathematical Olympiad in
Hungary in 1970. He went up to
Cambridge and received a
BA in
mathematics in 1974. In 1978, he was appointed the Rolls-Royce Research Fellow in
Aerodynamics at
Emmanuel College, Cambridge and was awarded a
PhD in 1980.
From 1980 to 1990, Furber worked at
Acorn Computers Ltd where he was a Hardware Designer and then Design Manager. He was a principal designer of the
BBC Micro and the
ARM microprocessor. In August 1990 he moved to the
Victoria University of Manchester to become the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering and established the
Amulet research group.
In February 1997, Furber was elected a Fellow of the
British Computer Society. In 1998, he became a member of the European Working Group on Asynchronous Circuit Design (ACiD-WG). In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society and was Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry into microprocessor technology. In 2003, he was a member of the EPSRC research cluster in biologically-inspired novel computation. On
16 September 2004, he gave a speech on
Hardware Implementations of Large-scale Neural Networks as part of the initiation activities of the
Alan Turing Institute. He was elected a Fellow of the
IEEE in 2005.
Furber is a Fellow of the
Royal Academy of Engineering,
of the Royal Society, the
IEEE and the
Institution of Electrical Engineers, and is a
Chartered Engineer. He is on the Advisory Board of
Theseus Logic, Inc.Furber's research interests include
asynchronous systems, ultra-low-power processors for
sensor networks, on-chip interconnect and GALS (
Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous), and
neural systems engineering.
*
Home page*
IEE information*
Acorn recollections
