James D. Y. Collier

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,^[6] Jonathan Kimmitt, Carl Orsborn, Ian Sabberton, Justin Penfold, Robert Young and Graham Pink.^[7] He served as CTO of CSR which was acquired by Qualcomm in 2015.^[5] Using short-range wireless technology, CSR became a major supplier of integrated circuit designs for Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi.^[7] As a fabless manufacturing company, CSR created the first production ready, single chip, CMOS implementation of the Bluetooth standard^[8] by putting a radio transmitter, microprocessor and baseband on a single integrated circuit.^[7] The techniques developed are now commonplace and included in many consumer wireless devices.^[9]

Between 1984 and 1999, Collier held executive and technical positions at Cambridge Consultants. Prior to 1984, Collier held a number of executive and technical positions at Schlumberger.^[8] Collier also served as director UbiNetics IP Ltd from 2005.^[1]

In 2010, Collier set up Neul Limited with Glenn Collinson with £8 million in initial investment to exploit machine to machine communication in the weightless wireless communications market.^[7] Neul was based in Cambridge Science Park and developed wireless network technology to enable the use of the white space spectrum.^[1][2][10] Neul had a change of management in 2013 after Collier was ousted by the investors.^[11] Neul was not successful in commercialising weightless technology^[12] and was later acquired by Huawei in 2014 for $25 million USD.^[2]

In 2005, Collier won the MacRobert Award with his CSR colleagues John Hodgson, Phil O'Donovan,^[6] Glenn Collinson and Chris Ladas for their work on Bluecore.^[13][14][15] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016^[9] and is also a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET) and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).^[4]