The lecture took place on Tuesday 12th February 2008 in our London office.

Lecture by Prof. Steve Furber - University of Manchester. The lecture was followed by a debate.

The Talk

Progress in computer technology over the last four decades has been spectacular, driven by Moore's Law which, though initially an observation, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a board-room planning tool.

Although Gordon Moore expressed his vision of progress simply in terms of the number of transistors that could be manufactured economically on an integrated circuit, the means of achieving this progress was based principally on shrinking transistor dimensions, and with that came collateral gains in performance, power-efficiency and, last but not least, cost.

The semiconductor industry appears to be confident in its ability to continue to shrink transistors, at least for another decade or so, but the game is already changing. We can no longer assume that smaller circuits will go faster, or be more power-efficient.

As we approach atomic limits, device variability is beginning to hurt, and design costs are going through the roof. This is impacting the economics of design in ways that will affect the entire computing and communications industries.

For example, on the desktop there is a trend away from high-speed uniprocessors towards multi-core processors, despite the fact that general-purpose parallel programming remains one of the great unsolved problems of computer science.

If computers are to benefit from future advances in technology then there are major challenges ahead, involving understanding how to build reliable systems on increasingly unreliable technology and how to exploit parallelism increasingly effectively, not only to improve performance, but also to mask the consequences of component failure.

Biological systems demonstrate many of the properties we aspire to incorporate into our engineered technology, so perhaps that suggests a possible source of ideas that we could seek to incorporate into future novel computation systems?

The Speaker

 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, UK.

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. The APT group is supported by an EPSRC Portfolio Partnership Award.

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, 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".

In 2004 he became the holder of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award . In 2007 he was awarded the IET Faraday Medal, "...the most prestigious of the IET Achievement Medals."  

Read the report from this lecture


The paper from this lecture was published in the Computer Journal.

Enquiries regarding this and similar events

Enquiries to Joanne Butcher at:
BCS, 1st Floor, Block D, North Star House, North Star Avenue, Swindon, UK, SN2 1FA.
Tel: 01793 417 623.
Email: joanne.butcher@hq.bcs.org.uk.