The article in EE Times – the electronics industry’s online newspaper of record - celebrates what and who EE Times’ editors think will have the biggest influence on the way this century develops.  Others on the list include Al Gore, China and the fuel cell.

Parallelism, a form of computing in which many instructions are carried out simultaneously, is one of the biggest challenges on the electronics agenda, and few people have a better grasp of its theoretical background and software implications than Professor May.

He was chief architect of the Transputer architecture for Inmos Ltd between 1979 and the mid-1980s. The Transputer was a pioneering single-chip processor designed to support parallel processing. The Transputer is no more, but the design was 25 years ahead of its time.

XMOS is today one of a host of companies, including Intel, working on how to offer parallelism using the abundance of transistors on a single integrated circuit.  Professor May is the developer of the company's Software-Defined Silicon product architecture.

Professor May said: “I hope to remain at the forefront of advances in parallelism as the decade rolls on.”