Newsroom
Sondrel chief Graham Curren has electric dreams for China
26 August 2011
On the wall is a large black screen, speckled with a constellation of tiny white dots. Zoom in, and the dots swell into clusters and then suddenly mushroom into a mass of black and white squiggles. It looks like a microscopic image of cells, or the sequencing of a gene, but it is in fact the face of a silicon computer chip, or rather a 0.2mm cross-section of one. The squiggles are masses of transistors, the gates which snap open and shut, routing electricity from one side of the chip to the other and producing calculations as they do so. These days, engineers can put a billion transistors on a 20mm-wide chip.
How these are arranged, however, is the job of Graham Curren, the chief executive of Sondrel, one of the UK's leading chip designers. "What we do is take those blobs and work out how they would be most efficiently placed," he said. "We take what the designer has thought up and turn it into a physical reality.
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The Queens Award for Enterprise: Innovation 2009
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