David Greaves, Short Biography

Dr David Greaves, MIEE, completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1989 on the subject of ATM metropolitan area networks. His undergraduate supervisor was Dr Martin Richards and his postgraduate supervisor (advisor) was Prof Andy Hopper. His father, Peter Greaves, is a pioneering electronic engineer who worked at Rank, EMI and IBM and holds patents in a variety of related fields. Likewise, David Greaves has extensive expertise in electronic circuitry, covering the audio, digital and RF domains and has designed numerous hardware systems at chip and board level.

First employments were at Plessey Roke Manor and IBM Research Hursley Park. Dr Greaves then became a research engineer at Olivetti Research in Cambridge, where he developed early ATM switches and host interfaces. In 1993, he was network architect for the Cambridge Interactive Television Trial, an early trial which was the world's first testbed to provide packet-switched network connectivity all the way to the home. This broadband system ran for 18 months and served more than 50 homes and schools. He currently holds the position of Senior University Lecturer in Cambridge. Dr Greaves wrote the original business plan for Virata Ltd/Inc (now part of Conexant) and served as Chief Scientist of from founding through to IPO. In 2000 Dr Greaves founded Tenison EDA (now part of ARC which is part of Synopsys) and later he also served on the technical board of ARC www.arc.com. ARC is the leading company, worldwide, in configurable processor technology.

Dr Greaves is a member of the Systems Research Group and Processor Architecture Groups. He also participates in the Hardware Verification Group. He undertakes research in the area of hardware design and system specification with emphasis on component interconnection and embedded systems.

His general interest is advanced tooling for hardware description using logic programming and automated decision procedures. He has recently been working on tools for various RTL languages including a fault-tolerant Bluespec flow, the Kiwi Project, which is a high-level synthesis of the C# language for application acceleration, and on power modelling using SystemC transactional models.

In the AutoHAN project, Dr Greaves' group is investigating feature interaction conflicts, that may arise when a number of applications compete for control of the same physical resources. This work has applications ranging from automotive, safety-critical control to home networks. It also ties-in with automatic assembly of IP blocks for a System On Chip.

He holds half a dozen patents and has supervised or examined 50+ PhD students. He is chair of the Tripos at the Computer Laboratory and an external examiner at Imperial College London. He is Fellow and Director of Studies in Computer Science at Corpus Christi College.

Updated January 2014.