Sophie Wilson

Wilson was raised in Leeds, Yorkshire, by parents who were both teachers, her father specialising in English and her mother in physics. She studied computer science and the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge. In an Easter break from university, Wilson designed a microcomputer with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor inspired by the earlier MK14, which was used to electronically control feed for cows.

In 1978, she joined Acorn Computers Ltd, after designing a device to prevent cigarette lighter sparks triggering payouts on fruit machines. Her computer design was used by Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser to build the Acorn Micro-Computer, the first of a long line of computers sold by the company.

In July 1981, Wilson extended the Acorn Atom's BASIC programming language dialect into an improved version for the Acorn Proton, a microcomputer that enabled Acorn to win the contract with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for their ambitious computer education project. Hauser played a mental game where he told both Wilson and colleague Steve Furber that the other had agreed a prototype could be built within a week. Agreeing to the challenge, she designed the system including the circuit board and components from Monday to Wednesday, which required fast new DRAM integrated circuits to be sourced directly from Hitachi. By Thursday evening, a prototype had been built, but the software had bugs, requiring her to stay up all night and into Friday debugging. Wilson recalled watching the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on a small portable television while attempting to debug and re-solder the prototype. It was a success with the BBC, who awarded Acorn the contract. Along with Furber, Wilson was present backstage at the machine's first airing on television, in case any software fixes were required. She later described the event as "a unique moment in time when the public wanted to know how this stuff works and could be shown and taught how to program." The Proton became the BBC Micro and its BASIC evolved into BBC BASIC, whose development was led by Wilson for the next 15 years. As well as programming, she wrote the manuals and technical specifications, realising communication was an important part of being successful.

In October 1983, Wilson began designing the instruction set for one of the first reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), The ARM1 was delivered on 26 April 1985 and worked first time. This processor type was later to become one of the most successful IP cores — a licensed CPU core — and by 2012 was being used in 95% of smartphones.

Wilson designed Acorn Replay, the video architecture for Acorn machines. This included the operating system extensions for video access, as well as the codecs, optimized to run high frame rate video on ARM CPUs from the ARM 2 onwards.

She was a member of the board of the technology and games company Eidos Interactive, which bought and created Eidos Interactive, for the years following its flotation in 1990, and was a consultant to ARM Ltd when it was split off from Acorn in 1990.

Wilson giving a public presentation on ARM development in 2009

Since the demise of Acorn Computers, Wilson has made a small number of public appearances to talk about work done there.

She is now the Director of IC Design in Broadcom's Cambridge, UK office. She was the Chief Architect of Broadcom's Firepath processor. Firepath has its history in Acorn Computers, which, after being renamed to Element 14, was bought by Broadcom in 2000.

She was listed in 2011 in Maximum PC as number 8 in an article titled The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History. She was awarded the Fellow Award by the Computer History Museum in California in 2012 "for her work, with Steve Furber, on the BBC Micro computer and the ARM processor architecture." In 2013 Sophie was elected as a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society. She received the 2014 Lovie Lifetime Achievement Award in acknowledgement for her significant invention of the ARM processor.

Wilson is a transgender woman. She enjoys photography and is involved in a local theatre group, where she is in charge of costumes and set pieces and has acted in a number of productions. She has also played a cameo role as a pub landlady in the BBC television drama Micro Men, in which a younger Wilson is played by Stefan Butler.