Steve Furber | |
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Born | Stephen Byram Furber 21 March 1953 [1] Manchester, England [2] |
Education | Manchester Grammar School |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge (BA, MMath, PhD) [1] [3] |
Known for | |
Spouse | Valerie Margaret Elliott (m. 1977) |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Is the Weis-Fogh principle exploitable in turbomachines? (1979) |
Doctoral advisor | John Ffowcs Williams [9] [10] |
Notable students | Simon Segars [11] |
Website | apt manchester |
Stephen Byram Furber CBE FRS FREng [12] (born 21 March 1953) [1] is a British computer scientist, mathematician and hardware engineer, and Emeritus ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. [13] After completing his education at the University of Cambridge (BA, MMath, PhD), he spent the 1980s at Acorn Computers, where he was a principal designer of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. [14] As of 2023 [update] , over 250 billion ARM chips have been manufactured, powering much of the world's mobile computing and embedded systems, everything from sensors to smartphones to servers. [15] [16] [17] [3]
In 1990, he moved to Manchester to lead research into asynchronous circuits, low-power electronics [18] and neural engineering, where the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker) project is delivering a computer incorporating a million ARM processors optimised for computational neuroscience. [8] [19] [20] [21] [22]
Furber was educated at Manchester Grammar School [1] [23] and represented the UK in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hungary in 1970 winning a bronze medal. [24] He went on to study the Mathematical Tripos as an undergraduate student of St John's College, Cambridge, receiving a Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Master of Mathematics (MMath – Part III of the Mathematical Tripos) degrees. [3] In 1978, he was appointed a Rolls-Royce research fellow in aerodynamics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and was awarded a PhD in 1980 for research on the fluid dynamics of the Weis-Fogh mechanism [10] supervised by John Ffowcs Williams. [9] [25] [26] During his PhD in the late 1970s, Furber worked on a voluntary basis for Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry within the fledging Acorn Computers (originally the Cambridge Processor Unit), on a number of projects; notably a microprocessor based fruit machine controller, and the Proton – the initial prototype version of what was to become the BBC Micro, in support of Acorn's tender for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. [27] [28] [29] [30] [31]
In 1981, following the completion of his PhD and the award of the BBC contract to Acorn computers, Furber joined Acorn where he was a Hardware Designer and then Design Manager. He was involved in the final design and production of the BBC Micro and later, the Acorn Electron, and the ARM microprocessor. In August 1990 he moved to the University of Manchester to become the International Computers Limited (ICL) Professor of Computer Engineering and established the AMULET microprocessor research group.
Furber's main research interests are in neural networks, networks on chip and microprocessors. [8] In 2003, Furber was a member of the EPSRC research cluster in biologically inspired [32] 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 [ citation needed ].
Furber's most recent project SpiNNaker, [4] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] is an attempt to build a new kind of computer that directly mimics the workings of the human brain. Spinnaker is an artificial neural network realised in hardware, a massively parallel processing system eventually designed to incorporate a million ARM processors. [38] [39] The finished Spinnaker will model 1 per cent of the human brain's capability, or around 1 billion neurons. The Spinnaker project [40] aims amongst other things to investigate:
Furber believes that "significant progress in either direction will represent a major scientific breakthrough". [40] Furber's research interests include asynchronous systems, ultra-low-power processors for sensor networks, on-chip interconnect and globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS), [41] and neural systems engineering. [42] [43] [44] [45]
His research has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), [46] Royal Society [12] and the European Research Council (ERC). [3]
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). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2002 [12] and was Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry into microprocessor technology.[ citation needed ]
Furber was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), [1] the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2005[ citation needed ] and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET).[ when? ] He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng).[ when? ] In September 2007 he was awarded the Faraday Medal [47] and in 2010 he gave the Pinkerton Lecture. [48]
Furber was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours [49] [50] and was elected as one of the three laureates of Millennium Technology Prize in 2010 (with Richard Friend and Michael Grätzel), for development of ARM processor. [51] In 2012, Furber was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his work, with Sophie Wilson, on the BBC Micro computer and the ARM processor architecture." [52] [53]
In 2004 he was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. [12] In 2014, he was made a Distinguished Fellow at the British Computer Society (DFBCS) recognising his contribution to the IT profession and industry. [54] Furber's nomination for the Royal Society reads:
Professor Furber is distinguished for his fundamental contributions to the design and analysis of electronic systems, especially microprocessors. He was the original designer of the hardware architecture of the ARM processor, the world's leading embedded processor core and a major engineering and commercial success for the United Kingdom. Having moved to Manchester University, he established a research team to investigate asynchronous processor design, which rapidly made fundamental contributions to the field. He has shown how to combine academic design theories with practical engineering constraints to achieve a remarkable and elegant synthesis. His work demonstrates in particular how to design microprocessors with low power and low radio frequency emissions, necessary for future wireless applications. Furber has designed a series of highly original asynchronous processors to execute the ARM instruction set. These have been fabricated and subjected to extensive experimental analysis. Furber's group is the world's leading centre of research in both fundamental theory and engineering implementation of such devices. [55]
In 2009, Unsworth Academy (formerly called Castlebrook High School) in Manchester introduced a house system, with Furber being one of the four houses. [56] On 15 October 2010, Furber officially opened the Independent Learning Zone in Unsworth Academy. [57] In 2012, a building at Radbroke Hall was named in his honour by Barclays Bank. [58]
In 2022, he was awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering of the United States of America alongside John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson and Sophie M. Wilson for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips. [59] [7] Furber was played by actor Sam Philips in the BBC Four documentary drama Micro Men, [60] first aired on 8 October 2009.
Furber is married to Valerie Elliot with two daughters, 3 grandchildren [1] and plays bass guitar. [23]
Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the UK, including the Acorn Electron and the Acorn Archimedes. Acorn's BBC Micro computer dominated the UK educational computer market during the 1980s.
Sophie Mary WilsonDistFBCS is an English computer scientist, a co-designer of the Instruction Set for the ARM architecture.
Bio-inspired computing, short for biologically inspired computing, is a field of study which seeks to solve computer science problems using models of biology. It relates to connectionism, social behavior, and emergence. Within computer science, bio-inspired computing relates to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Bio-inspired computing is a major subset of natural computation.
Neuromorphic computing is an approach to computing that is inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. A neuromorphic computer/chip is any device that uses physical artificial neurons to do computations. In recent times, the term neuromorphic has been used to describe analog, digital, mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI, and software systems that implement models of neural systems. The implementation of neuromorphic computing on the hardware level can be realized by oxide-based memristors, spintronic memories, threshold switches, transistors, among others. Training software-based neuromorphic systems of spiking neural networks can be achieved using error backpropagation, e.g., using Python based frameworks such as snnTorch, or using canonical learning rules from the biological learning literature, e.g., using BindsNet.
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester is the longest established department of Computer Science in the United Kingdom and one of the largest. It is located in the Kilburn Building on the Oxford Road and currently has over 800 students taking a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses and 60 full-time academic staff.
David Andrew Patterson is an American computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at Google. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley.
Christopher Curry is the co-founder of Acorn Computers, with Hermann Hauser and Andy Hopper. He became a millionaire as a result of Acorn's success.
AMULET is a series of microprocessors implementing the ARM processor architecture. Developed by the Advanced Processor Technologies group at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, AMULET is unique amongst ARM implementations in being an asynchronous microprocessor, not making use of a square wave clock signal for data synchronization and movement.
Asynchronous circuit is a sequential digital logic circuit that does not use a global clock circuit or signal generator to synchronize its components. Instead, the components are driven by a handshaking circuit which indicates a completion of a set of instructions. Handshaking works by simple data transfer protocols. Many synchronous circuits were developed in early 1950s as part of bigger asynchronous systems. Asynchronous circuits and theory surrounding is a part of several steps in integrated circuit design, a field of digital electronics engineering.
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are artificial neural networks (ANN) that more closely mimic natural neural networks. In addition to neuronal and synaptic state, SNNs incorporate the concept of time into their operating model. The idea is that neurons in the SNN do not transmit information at each propagation cycle, but rather transmit information only when a membrane potential—an intrinsic quality of the neuron related to its membrane electrical charge—reaches a specific value, called the threshold. When the membrane potential reaches the threshold, the neuron fires, and generates a signal that travels to other neurons which, in turn, increase or decrease their potentials in response to this signal. A neuron model that fires at the moment of threshold crossing is also called a spiking neuron model.
The BBC Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a series of microcomputers designed and built by Acorn Computers Limited in the 1980s for the Computer Literacy Project of the BBC. The machine was the focus of a number of educational BBC TV programmes on computer literacy, starting with The Computer Programme in 1982, followed by Making the Most of the Micro, Computers in Control in 1983, and finally Micro Live in 1985.
The Manchester computers were an innovative series of stored-program electronic computers developed during the 30-year period between 1947 and 1977 by a small team at the University of Manchester, under the leadership of Tom Kilburn. They included the world's first stored-program computer, the world's first transistorised computer, and what was the world's fastest computer at the time of its inauguration in 1962.
Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
Manycore processors are special kinds of multi-core processors designed for a high degree of parallel processing, containing numerous simpler, independent processor cores. Manycore processors are used extensively in embedded computers and high-performance computing.
Kwabena Adu Boahen is a Ghanaian-born Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania.
SpiNNaker is a massively parallel, manycore supercomputer architecture designed by the Advanced Processor Technologies Research Group (APT) at the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester. It is composed of 57,600 processing nodes, each with 18 ARM9 processors and 128 MB of mobile DDR SDRAM, totalling 1,036,800 cores and over 7 TB of RAM. The computing platform is based on spiking neural networks, useful in simulating the human brain.
A cognitive computer is a computer that hardwires artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms into an integrated circuit that closely reproduces the behavior of the human brain. It generally adopts a neuromorphic engineering approach. Synonyms include neuromorphic chip and cognitive chip.
Simon Anthony Segars is a British business executive executive who was chief executive officer (CEO) of ARM Holdings plc from 2013 to 2022. ARM is the UK's largest semiconductor IP company headquartered in Cambridge, England, and was acquired by SoftBank Group for £24.3 billion in 2016.
In computational neuroscience, SUPS or formerly CUPS is a measure of a neuronal network performance, useful in fields of neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computer science.
David Jaggar is a computer scientist who was responsible for the development of the ARM architecture between 1992 and 2000, redefining it from a low-cost workstation processor to the dominant embedded system processor.
The design of a general-purpose processor, in common with most engineering endeavours, requires careful consideration of many trade-offs and compromises
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Maths is the only sport I've played for my country
UK scientists aim to model 1 per cent of a human brain with up to one million ARM cores. ... ARM was approached in May 2005 to participate in SpiNNaker ... agreement extends to Manchester making enough chips for a computer with a million cores.
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