XMOS taps ARM for advisory board

Joining the XMOS advisory board are Richard Bahr, Professor Stephen Furber, John Hodgson, Dr. Lucio Lanza, Sir Robin Saxby and Dr. Ivan Edward Sutherland.

“We couldn’t ask for a better, more experienced set of industry veterans to act as our advisors,” said Terry Leeder, XMOS president and CEO. “Their interest in XMOS speaks of the potential for the products to redefine the way the next generation of embedded systems are designed.”

Richard Bahr has been the vice president of engineering for US WiFi chip designer Atheros Communications. Prior to joining the highly successful wireless semiconductor company Atheros, he was the vice president of engineering for Silicon Graphics.

Professor Stephen Furber is the ICL professor of computer engineering at the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Among his notable achievements is his work at Acorn where he was one of the designers of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32bit RISC microprocessor. In 2010, Furber was elected as one of the three laureates of the Millennium Technology Prize, awarded by the Technology Academy of Finland, for development of the ARM processor.

John Hodgson was the CEO of Cambridge Silicon Radio from 2000 to 2006 and took the company public on the LSE in 2004. Prior to CSR, Mr. Hodgson was the Vice President of World Wide Sales and an Officer at AT&T Microelectronics (later became Lucent Microelectronics). He also served as the Vice President of World Wide Sales for VLSI technology from 1997 to 2000.

Dr Lucio Lanza is the managing director at Lanza techVentures, a venture capital firm that he founded in January 2001. He has held a number of senior industry marketing, engineering and general management positions including many years at Olivetti S.p.A. Dr. Lanza has served as senior vice president and chief strategist for Cadence Design Systems, as well as chairman of Intel’s Microprocessor Business Segment. Dr. Lanza has been the chairman of the board of directors of Artisan Components Inc. until their acquisition by ARM in 2004.

Sir Robin Saxby is the former CEO and chairman of ARM having joined the Cambridge-based company as the first CEO in 1991. He has also worked at Rank Bush Murphy, Pye, Motorola and Henderson Security. Immediately prior to his appointment at ARM, he worked at European Silicon Structures. He received the Faraday Medal of the IEE (now the IET) and was knighted in the 2002 New Year’s Honors List.

Dr. Ivan Sutherland is an American computer scientist and computing pioneer. Considered by many to be the creator of computer graphics, he received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. Dr. Sutherland was a co-founder of the pioneering computer graphics company, Evans and Sutherland. He served for many years as a Fellow at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). With the title “Visiting Scientist” Ivan continues to work on advanced computing systems in the newly formed Asynchronous Research Center at Portland State University. Dr. Sutherland is a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering and of the National Academy of Sciences.