The Colin Campbell Mitchell Award commemorates the life and work of one of Scotland's most accomplished marine engineers, Edinburgh-born Colin Campbell Mitchell OBE FRSE (1904-69).
He had a long and distinguished career with Brown Brothers Engineering, where he pioneered the development of the steam catapult for use on aircraft carriers.
The award is given to an individual or team of up to six engineers, either working or studying in the UK. It is awarded for having made the greatest contribution to the advancement of any field of engineering within the period of the four years prior to the making of the award.
A cash prize of £3,000 will be awarded to an individual and £6,000 will be awarded to a team.
2024 winner
The Arm Architecture Formal Team
The Arm Architecture Formal Team has developed practical tools to model and test computer chips, paving the way for more reliable computing systems.
Efficient computing is enabled by multiprocessor chips, which feature several processing elements, performing tasks in parallel. These processing elements need to communicate with each other to perform their overall common task, and this may lead to subtle bugs.
Clear definitions of hardware behaviours are crucial as without them devices can behave in unpredictable ways. However, historically the interactions of concurrent processing elements have been described in an informal manner, complicating matters for both the hardware engineers designing chips and the software engineers programming them. To address this issue, Professor Jade Alglave FREng and Luc Maranget created formal models of concurrent systems. Professor Alglave and Maranget invented a language (cat) and software tools (herd, diy) for writing and experimenting with the models.
Image credit: Rob Lacey
As part of the Arm Architecture Formal Team, Professor Alglave and the team enhanced the models and tools to encompass more features of the Arm architecture. Furthermore, these models and tools are used to look for bugs in chip designs ahead of deployment, which is important since fixing hardware afterwards can be prohibitively expensive. The team is also developing a formal and executable definition of the Architecture Specification Language (ASL) used at Arm to describe how instructions operate.
The models are publicly available and the tools are open-source, allowing researchers to use industrial models and widen the impact of their work. Hardware and software vendors can also use the models and tools to check their systems.
Recent winners
2023: Professor Mohan Edirisinghe OBE FREng
Professor Edirisinghe OBE FREng was recognised for his world-leading contribution to the industrial application of polymeric fibres by inventing novel fibre manufacturing vessels and processes.
2022: Rolls Royce ACCEL
The Rolls-Royce ACCEL (short for ‘Accelerating the Electrification of Flight’) project received the 2022 Colin Campbell Mitchell Award. The Spirit of Innovation aircraft represents the world’s fastest electric vehicle and was developed to accelerate the electrification of aerospace and demonstrate the potential for sustainable net zero aviation.
2021: Vector Photonics
The 2021 award was presented to the three engineers—Dr Richard Taylor, Dr David Childs and Professor Richard Hogg—behind the development of a revolutionary semiconductor laser. The laser was hailed as the biggest breakthrough in this field in 30 years.