It's a record year for women at the Royal Academy of
Engineering, with four elected Fellows of the Academy, writes
David Manners of Electronics Weekly.
Sophie Wilson, who co-developed the first
ARM microprocessor with
Professor Steve
Furber of Manchester University, has been elected a Fellow of
the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Three women from other engineering disciplines were also elected
this year, making 2009 a record year for women at the Academy,
which promotes the engineering and technological welfare of the
UK.
When Wilson and Furber were asked to build a new microprocessor
from scratch for the Acorn Computer, Acorn CEO, Hermann Hauser
said: "I gave them two things which National, Intel and Motorola
had never given their design teams: the first was no money; the
second was no people. The only way they could do it was to keep it
really simple."
Furber designed the architecture, and Wilson developed the
instruction set. "While IBM spent months simulating their
instruction sets on large mainframes, Sophie did it all in her
head," said Hauser.
Now ARM is the best selling 32-bit microprocessor in the
world.
This story was first reported by our sister title
Electronics Weekly: Record year for women elected to Royal
Academy of Engineering.