Steve Furber

Steve Furber
Furber in 2009
Born
Stephen Byram Furber

(1953-03-21) 21 March 1953 (age 71)[6]
Manchester, England[7]
EducationManchester Grammar School
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (BA, MMath, PhD)[6][8]
Known for
Spouse
Valerie Margaret Elliott
(m. 1977)
[6]
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisIs the Weis-Fogh principle exploitable in turbomachines? (1979)
Doctoral advisorJohn Ffowcs Williams[3][4]
Notable studentsSimon Segars[5]
Websiteapt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/sfurber
manchester.ac.uk/research/steve.furber

Stephen Byram Furber (born 21 March 1953)[6] 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.[12] 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.[13] As of 2023, 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.[14][15][16][8]

In 1990, he moved to Manchester to lead research into asynchronous circuits, low-power electronics[17] and neural engineering, where the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker) project is delivering a computer incorporating a million ARM processors optimised for computational neuroscience.[2][18][19][20][21]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference draper was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b c d Steve Furber publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  3. ^ Steve Furber at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Edit this at Wikidata
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference furberphd was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Segars, Simon Anthony (1996). Low power microprocessor design (MSc thesis). University of Manchester. OCLC 643624237. Copac 36604476.
  6. ^ a b c d Anon (2015). "Furber, Prof. Stephen Byram". Who's Who (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.43464. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  7. ^ Brown, David (1 February 2010). "A Conversation with Steve Furber". Queue. Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 7 March 2012.
  8. ^ a b Steve Furber's ORCID 0000-0002-6524-3367
  9. ^ Furber, S. B.; Galluppi, F.; Temple, S.; Plana, L. A. (2014). "The SpiNNaker Project". Proceedings of the IEEE. 102 (5): 652–665. doi:10.1109/JPROC.2014.2304638. S2CID 25268038.
  10. ^ "The Human Brain Project SP 9: Neuromorphic Computing Platform" on YouTube
  11. ^ Furber, Stephen B. (2000). ARM system-on-chip architecture (2 ed.). Boston: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-67519-6. The design of a general-purpose processor, in common with most engineering endeavours, requires careful consideration of many trade-offs and compromises
  12. ^ "Prof Steve Furber CBE FRS FREng FBCS FIET CITP CEng – The University of Manchester". research.manchester.ac.uk.
  13. ^ Lean, Thomas (22 October 2012). "Steve Furber: developing ARM with no people and no money". British Library. Archived from the original on 10 November 2016. Retrieved 6 May 2014.
  14. ^ Anon (2023). "Arm is Everywhere Technology Matters: 250+ Billion Chips in Everything from Sensors to Smartphones to Servers". arm.com.
  15. ^ "Inside the numbers: 100 billion ARM-based chips". 27 February 2017.
  16. ^ "Enabling Mass IoT connectivity as Arm partners ship 100 billion chips". 27 February 2017.
  17. ^ Furber, Stephen B. (1989). VLSI RISC architecture and organization. New York: M. Dekker. ISBN 0-8247-8151-1.
  18. ^ Grier, D. A. (2014). "Steve Furber [Interviews]". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 36: 58–68. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2014.8. S2CID 28152764.
  19. ^ ARM and its Partners talk about reaching the 50 Billion chip milestone on YouTube
  20. ^ Steve Furber publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  21. ^ National Life Stories, Professor Steve Furber Interviewed by Thomas Lean, British Library