AI-conscious Arm injects £3.5m into CASCADE to fund PhD students

The first three students backed by the Arm money start their studies in the autumn of 2025. They will be followed by another three students for each of the ensuing four years.

Cambridge headquartered Arm is the first organisation to donate to the CASCADE Centre, which is based at the Department of Computer Science and Technology.

Centre Director Professor Timothy Jones says: “As well as funding 15 PhD students over the next five years, their involvement is helping us realise our vision of a Centre where research into addressing key challenges in this field is informed and supported by our industrial partners.

“This is extremely valuable to us as we work to make the Centre a destination for collaboration between companies, generating pre-competitive open-source artefacts and driving development of novel computer architectures.”

Richard Grisenthwaite, executive vice president and chief architect at Arm, said the initiative was a crucial one for Cambridge and technological advancement.

He said: “Our long-standing commitment to the University of Cambridge through this latest CASCADE funding highlights the vital collaboration between academia and industry as we embark on ground-breaking intent-based programming work to realise the future promise of AI through the next generation of processor designs.

“The Centre has the potential to enable further technology innovation within the semiconductor industry and is an important part of Arm's mission to build the future of computing.”

As the University makes clear, computer architecture is a critical area of computing. It underpins today’s technologies and drives the next generation of computing systems.

The Department of Computer Science and Technology says it is proud of its research and innovation in this area. It adds that the recently published National Semiconductor Strategy underlined how vital such work is, underlining that the UK is currently a leader in computer architecture. But the University underlines that to maintain this leading position, there must be investment in developing ‘the research leaders of tomorrow.’

That's why the new CASCADE Research Centre was established – to fund PhD students working in this area through support from industry. It is currently taking applications for its first cohort of students.

The Centre will focus on research that addresses some of the grand challenges in computer architecture, design automation and semiconductors.

PhD students will work alongside researchers here who have expertise across the breadth of the area, encompassing the design and optimisation of general-purpose microprocessors, specialised accelerators, on-chip interconnect and memory systems, verification, compilation and networking, quantum architecture and resource estimation. This will allow them to explore the areas they are most passionate about, while addressing industry-relevant research.

Students receiving funding from Arm will be working in the general area of intent-based computing, researching future systems that communicate what programs will do in the future so that the processor can make better decisions about how to execute them.

Quoted on the Nasdaq market in the US, Arm was born in Cambridge in 1990 with the goal of changing the computing landscape. Its success since then in designing, architecting, and licensing high-performance, power-efficient CPUs – the 'brains' of all computers and many household and electronic devices – helped fuel the smartphone revolution and has made Arm a household name.

Arm has enjoyed a long and fruitful research relationship with the Department. Most notably, this has led to the development of new cybersecurity technology, focusing on innovative ways to design the architecture of a computer's CPU to make software less vulnerable to security breaches.

The technology, CHERI, extends conventional architectures and software stacks with novel hardware support for memory protection and secure encapsulation.

Since early 2022, Arm's industrial demonstrator of the technology – the Morello Board – has been made available to UK companies for testing through the UK government's £200 million+ Digital Security by Design programme.

• The CASCADE Research Centre is now taking applications for its first cohort of students to start in October 2025. The application deadline is Tuesday 3 December 2024. Individuals and companies who want to support the Centre should call Victoria Thompson: + 44 (0)7593 139 297.