Arm-ECS Research Centre co-director awarded 2019 James Clerk Maxwell Medal for ground-breaking contributions to electronics

Visiting Professor Dr David Flynn has been honoured for the exceptional impact of his career with a prestigious medal from the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

The co-director of the Arm-ECS Research Centre, an award-winning research collaboration between Arm and the University of Southampton, has been named a co-recipient of the IEEE and Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) 2019 James Clerk Maxwell Medal.

The honour recognises ground-breaking contributions in the development of electronics and electrical engineering, or related fields.

Dr Flynn has served as a Visiting Professor in Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science for the past decade and has nurtured a strong partnership between the University and his employer, Arm. The Arm-ECS Research Centre advances future mobile and embedded systems and was recently shortlisted for Research Collaboration of the Year at the 2018 TechWorks Awards.

The IEEE/RSE James Clerk Maxwell Medal was established in 2006 and is named in honour of the 19th century Scottish mathematician and physicist who laid the foundations of electromagnetic wave theory and radio communications. Dr Flynn will share the honour with former Arm Fellow David Jaggar, with their award citation commending their ‘contributions to the development of novel Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architectures adopted in over 100 billion microprocessors worldwide’.

Dr Flynn said: “As engineering practitioners it is with surprise and delight that David and I accept such a prestigious award and reflect back on the computer scientists and electronics engineers, educators and creative business partnership visionaries that inspired us in our early work at Advanced RISC Machines/ARM Ltd.”

Dr Flynn is a Director of Technology at Arm in Cambridge and a senior member of the IEEE. He is attached to Southampton’s Centre for Internet of Things and Pervasive Systems and regularly provides industrial oversight for postgraduate research. Under his direction with Southampton’s Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, the Arm-ECS Research Centre has focussed on advanced design methods, architectures and their practical validations for energy-efficient and dependable single-core and multi-core processor systems.

To date, the Centre’s projects have fabricated 12 new test chips, released three open source tools, collaborated on co-authoring 32 papers, graduated six co-supervised PhD students and completed 22 internships in Cambridge.