News

Thanks to a donation from AMD, we're expanding the number of PhD students we will welcome this autumn at CASCADE – our dedicated new Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design Centre.

CASCADE focuses on research to address some of the grand challenges in computer architecture, design automation and semiconductors. This is a critical area of computing that underpins today’s technologies and drives the next generation of computing systems.

We were delighted to see the CASCADE Centre named in the UK government's new Digital and Technologies Sector Plan, which sets out how it will support "the ideas and talent of Britain's scientists, technologists, innovators and entrepreneurs".

We held our first official CASCADE event in March 2025 — a poster session displaying a selection of research in Computer Architecture within the Department. We don't yet have any students in CASCADE, since the first cohort will start in October 2025, so we invited everyone working in the broad area to present their posters. We had a great turnout of both presenters and attendees from a range of different companies coming to see the world-leading research we are doing here.

Arm is donating £3.5 million to enable 15 PhD students over the next five years to study at CASCADE — a dedicated new Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design Centre.

The first three students to be supported by the Arm donation will begin their studies at the new Research Centre in the autumn of 2025. They will be followed by another three students each year for the following four years.

Today marks the start of the inaugural REACH conference organised by the IET, which aims to bring together leaders in computer architecture to explore key trends and stimulate debate with engineers, technologists and researchers at the cutting edge of the technologies.

We're pleased to announce that applications to the Centre are now open! We're going to be welcoming our first cohort of students into the Department in October 2025, and we're looking for enthusiastic and motivated people to join us.

At a special event in June 2024 we highlighted the work in Computer Architecture taking place in Cambridge — and discussed ways to build our future capacity in this field by creating this new Computer Architecture Research Centre for PhD students. Computer architecture is a critical area of computing: it underpins today's technologies and drives the next generation of computing systems.