Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Sir Robin Saxby
Oration given on Wednesday 9 July 2003
Chancellor, the Senate of the University has
resolved that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred on SIR
ROBIN SAXBY.
If I asked everyone in the audience to name a
microprocessor company, I imagine that the first name that would come to
mind would be Intel, perhaps because of first-hand experience using PCs,
perhaps because of Intel's very successful series of TV advertisements
promoting the benefits of 'Intel inside'. According to the Motley Fool
website, around 400 million Intel architecture chips were sold worldwide
last year. But there is another company whose chip designs have sold
more than 2 billion units over the last few years. That company is ARM
which is headquartered in Cambridge UK, but with a major global
influence; Sir Robin Saxby has led ARM since its formation as a spin-off
of ACORN Computers in 1990.
Sir Robin has a long and distinguished career in
the electronics and computer industry, starting out as a teenager with a
hobby interest (though in his case even then it had a commercial outlet,
running an electronics repair business). He completed an Electronics
degree at Liverpool University, before rapidly gaining industrial
experience in design and development at Rank Bush Murphy and Pye TMC. He
then moved to Motorola and rose rapidly through their hierarchy before
leaving to take up his first Chief executive role as head of Henderson
Security Systems (whose parent company were in Romford). After that he
worked for five years for European Silicon Structures – a chip foundry –
before being head-hunted to lead ARM from its formation as a 12-person
start-up to success as a multi-billion pound company listed in the
FTSE-100. His success was recognised in 2002 not only with a Knighthood
in the New Year’s Honours List, but also by the award of the Institution
of Electrical Engineer’s Faraday Medal, in recognition of his
outstanding contributions to the Electronics and IT industries in the
UK.
So how is it that while Intel is a household name,
many of you may never have heard of ARM? Part of the explanation is that
ARM is a new economy company. It designs chips, but instead of
manufacturing them itself, licenses its designs to – currently – 112
semiconductor "partner" manufacturers around the world, including Intel;
and it makes its money from licensing and royalties. But most of the
answer is that ARM's designs are incorporated in what we engineers and
computer scientists call 'embedded systems', consumer and industrial
products that use microprocessors to provide the flexible control,
signal processing and user interfaces which we all take for granted in
modern electronic systems. ARM has established a supremacy in one part
of this market – that for low-power, battery operated applications – and
now ARM’s potential rivals, including Intel, use ARM technology in their
products. Most of you in the audience probably have an ARM design on you
right now. I have three with me at present: a mobile phone (about 80% of
the world's mobile phones use ARM chip designs); a PDA (handheld
computer) which allows me to carry my diary, email, documents and
spreadsheets from my PC around with me, as well as playing music and
showing pictures; and my son's Game Boy Advance (which actually includes
2 ARM chips, as games are one of the most technically demanding
applications for computers)!
ARM is headquartered in East Anglia at Cambridge,
and around 80% of its 700 employees are graduate engineers and computer
scientists. Between 25% and 30% of its turnover is reinvested in
research and development, so it is a model of how the UK can lead the
world as a knowledge-based economy. Sir Robin himself has contributed
significantly to government thinking on how industry and universities
should interact through his input to parliamentary select committees and
to the various reviews of the supply of Science and Engineering skills
and wealth creation in the UK.
In addition to being the leading architecture for
chips in mobile handsets, ARM is also highly successful in other
developing areas of telecommunications and computer networks such as
wireless networking ('WiFi'), Bluetooth short range wireless
communications (often called Personal Area Networking), network
interface cards, security applications such as smart cards, and
automotive applications. In all these areas ARM's vision is towards
having not just one computer chip, but tens or even hundreds coupled
closely together through networks to provide us with intelligent
buildings, vehicles, and even clothes. ARM chips provide both the best
performance per dollar, and the best performance per Watt of power –
vital for portable devices – in the business, making the company the
world leader in its field.
Sir Robin's vision is shared here at Essex, where
we have specialised in telecommunications, networks and embedded systems
for many years. Indeed, the university is currently building a new £6M
Network Centre to bring together physically separated areas of Computer
Science and Electronic Systems Engineering, with the objective of
facilitating just the sort of collaborative and multidisciplinary
research and teaching in pervasive network applications which Sir Robin
envisages. Our own connections with ARM date back to 1991, when we
decided to use the elegant ARM computer architecture as the main
teaching example for our undergraduate degree schemes, precisely to make
our own students aware that there are other successful computer
architectures than Intel, and that one of the most successful of them
all is British. As a result, I am proud to say that several generations
of computer and electronic engineering students at Essex have already
graduated with intimate knowledge of ARM's technology, a situation that
continues to the current day. It is therefore only proper that we should
recognise and honour the person who has influenced so much of our
teaching and research here.
Chancellor, I present to you SIR ROBIN SAXBY
Orator: Professor Andy Downton