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[31] 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][32][33][34][35][36] 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.[37][38] The finished Spinnaker will model 1 per cent of the human brain's capability, or around 1 billion neurons. The Spinnaker project[39] aims amongst other things to investigate:
How can massively parallel computing resources accelerate our understanding of brain function?
How can our growing understanding of brain function point the way to more efficient parallel, fault-tolerant computation?
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 ARMinstruction 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]
The Furber Chair in Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Manchester is named in his honour. As of 2025[update] this is held by André van Schaik.[61]
Personal life
Furber playing bass guitar
Furber is married to Valerie Elliott with two daughters, 3 grandchildren[1] and plays bass guitar.[22]
↑Furber, Stephen B. (2000). ARM system-on-chip architecture (2ed.). Boston: Addison-Wesley. ISBN0-201-67519-6. The design of a general-purpose processor, in common with most engineering endeavours, requires careful consideration of many trade-offs and compromises
↑Xin Jin; Furber, S. B.; Woods, J. V. (2008). "Efficient modelling of spiking neural networks on a scalable chip multiprocessor". 2008 IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence). pp.2812–2819. doi:10.1109/IJCNN.2008.4634194. ISBN978-1-4244-1820-6. S2CID2103654.
↑Bush, Steve (8 July 2011). "One million ARM cores to simulate brain at Manchester". Electronics Weekly. Retrieved 11 July 2011. 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.
