Steve Furber

Steve Furber was the lead hardware designer of the original ARM processor at Acorn Computers, responsible for translating Sophie Wilson's instruction set architecture into actual silicon. Working alongside Wilson with a team of just four engineers, Furber's team produced ARM1 in 1985, an achievement remarkable for its speed of execution and for the chip's correct operation on its very first power-on test. Furber's hardware design principles — emphasizing simplicity, low power consumption, and manufacturability — shaped the physical implementation that would underpin all subsequent ARM processor generations.

Steve Furber served as the ARM processor's lead hardware designer at Acorn before the formation of Arm Ltd., but like Sophie Wilson did not join the new company directly. Instead, Furber pursued an academic career, joining the University of Manchester as the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering. At Manchester, he led the development of the SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) project, a massively parallel computing system designed to simulate the brain's neural architecture, which became one of the most ambitious neuromorphic computing research programs in the world. Furber was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was awarded a CBE in 2013 for services to computer science. He has remained an influential commentator on the semiconductor industry and on computing education in the United Kingdom, and his original ARM hardware design work is recognized as foundational to the mobile computing revolution.