Keynote: Innovation and Wealth Creation from Technology

R. Saxby (ARM, UK)

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Innovation is a key driver in today’s high technology businesses. But what is innovation? And what does it take to turn a good idea into a business success story? In this talk I’ll take a look at a number of innovative products and show what’s made them into winners. And by using ARM as an example, I’ll describe how a business can be built around innovation and how ARM developed a unique business model to exploit its key advantages. But once a company is successful, how do you maintain a competitive advantage? I’ll describe how a culture for innovation can be developed – and then look at where innovation might take us with a glimpse into the future. This will include a brief look at the critical importance of innovations in the field of test to the success of the processor core business as we move into the era of 65nm and below.

 

Speaker Biography: Sir Robin Saxby was involved in founding ARM and joined the company full-time in February 1991 as President and Chief Executive Officer, becoming Chairman in October 2001. Prior to ARM, he was with ES2, Motorola Semiconductors, and Henderson Security Systems Limited. He has also served as Chairman of the Open Microprocessor Initiative Advisory Group, which advised on collaborative R&D activity within Europe. He holds a BEng in Electronics and is a chartered engineer, Hon FIEE and FREng. He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liverpool where he is a Visiting Professor, has honorary doctorates from Loughborough University and the University of Essex, and has received the Faraday Medal of the IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers). He was knighted in the 2002 New Year’s Honours List. He currently serves as Deputy President of the IEE, where he is also a trustee. He is a non-executive director of Glotel plc.

 

Invited Address: Living with Failure: Lessons From Nature?

S. Furber (Univ. of Manchester, UK)

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Industry predictions suggest that within a decade we will see 100 billion transistor chips. The bad news is that 20 billion of those transistors will fail in manufacture and a further 10 billion will fail in the first year of operation. What does a 20-30% device failure rate mean for designers and for production test? Standard fault-tolerant design assumes that faults are infrequent; a 20-30% failure rate violates this assumption. For an example of a functional device that can cope with this level of failure we must look to nature. Brains cope with high levels of neuron failure. But we have no idea how they work, let alone how they keep working after these failures. What might we learn from biology about building systems that continue to function as components change and fail? How can we design future production tests to establish that enough of a chip works for it to be useful, and will continue to be useful after further early-life failures?

 

Speaker Biography: 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. He took up the ICL Chair at Manchester in 1990 where he now leads the EPSRC-funded Advanced Processor Technologies Portfolio Partnership. Steve is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the IEEE. In 2003 he was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, and in 2004 became the holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award.