Professor Steve Furber CBE

He has been a leading innovator in IT for many years. Starting with his design work for the BBC Micro, through his connection with ARM and his current Spinnaker project.

The BBC micro transformed the UK computing scene and his contribution to ARM helped to create a world class company. His creative approach to multi-processor systems continues with his million processor Spinnaker project.

He lectures regularly and has given freely of his time to the world’s leading learned societies including BCS.

Steve’s contribution is unequalled at the present time in the UK both for its substance and duration.

About Steve

Steve Furber is the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He received his B.A. degree in Mathematics in 1974 and his Ph.D. in Aerodynamics in 1980 from the University of Cambridge, England.

From 1980 to 1990 he worked in the hardware development group within the R&D department at Acorn Computers Ltd, and was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, both of which earned Acorn Computers a Queen's Award for Technology.

Upon moving to the University of Manchester in 1990 he established the Amulet research group which has interests in asynchronous logic design and power-efficient computing, and which merged with the Parallel Architectures and Languages group in 2000 to form the Advanced Processor Technologies group. From 2003 to 2008 the APT group was supported by an EPSRC Portfolio Partnership Award.

Steve served as Head of the Department of Computer Science in the Victoria University of Manchester from 2001 up to the merger with UMIST in 2004.

Fellowships and Awards

Steve is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the IEEE, a member of Academia Europaea and a Chartered Engineer.

In 2003 he was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for "an outstanding and demonstrated personal contribution to British engineering, which has led to market exploitation". He held a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award from 2004 to 2009. In 2007 he was awarded the IET Faraday Medal, "...the most prestigious of the IET Achievement Medals."

Steve was awarded a CBE in the 2008 New Year Honours list "for services to computer science". He was a 2010 Millenium Technology Prize Laureate. In 2012 he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA, USA.

He has Honorary DScs from the University of Edinburgh (2010) and Anglia Ruskin University (2012). He was a recipient of a 2013 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award.