Notable awards MacRobert Award Notable award MacRobert Award | Alma mater University of Oxford | |
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Institutions CSR, Schlumberger, Cambridge Consultants, UbiNetics | ||
James Digby Yarlet Collier (born December 1958) FRS FREng is a microelectronics engineer and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Neul Limited. Previously, he held several technical and executive positions at Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR), UbiNetics, Cambridge Consultants and Schlumberger
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Education
Collier was educated at the University of Oxford where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics.
Career
Collier has been active in and at the forefront of microelectronics system design for over 20 years, during which time the feature sizes of devices have fallen 100-fold from 2 micrometres to 20 nanometres. This discipline is a cross-over between detailed engineering and applied physics as engineering constraints and imperfections interact with the desired function, be it measurement or communications.
Collier co-founded CSR as a corporate spin-off from Cambridge Consultants Limited with a group of eight other people including Glenn Collinson, Phil O'Donovan, Jonathan Kimmitt, Carl Orsborn, Ian Sabberton, Justin Penfold, Robert Young and Graham Pink. He served as CTO of CSR which was acquired by Qualcomm in 2015. Using short-range wireless technology, CSR became a major supplier of integrated circuit designs for Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi. As a fabless manufacturing company, CSR created the first production ready, single chip, CMOS implementation of the Bluetooth standard by putting a radio transmitter, microprocessor and baseband on a single integrated circuit. The techniques developed are now commonplace and included in many consumer wireless devices.
Between 1984 and 1999, Collier held executive and technical positions at Cambridge Consultants, where he started the microelectronics group in 1987. Prior to 1984, Collier held a number of executive and technical positions at Schlumberger. Collier also served as director UbiNetics IP Ltd from 2005.
In 2010, Collier set up Neul Limited with Glenn Collinson with £8 million in initial investment to exploit machine to machine (M2M) communication in the weightless wireless communications market. Neul is based in Cambridge Science Park and develops wireless network technology to enable the use of the white space spectrum. Neul was acquired by Huawei in 2014.
Awards and honours
In 2005, Collier won the MacRobert Award with his CSR colleagues John Hodgson, Phil O’Donovan, Glenn Collinson and Chris Ladas for their work on Bluecore. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016 and is also a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET) and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).