AI innovator wins Princess Royal Silver Medal for brain-inspired systems

Professor Themis Prodromakis, Regius Chair of Engineering and RAEng Chair in Emerging Technologies at the School of Engineering, could revolutionise the energy efficiency of artificial intelligence with his brain-inspired computer chips that could enable smarter spacecraft and brain-computer interfaces.    

The Princess Royal Silver Medal celebrates an outstanding personal contribution made to UK engineering by an early to mid-career engineer resulting in market exploitation and up to four medals are awarded each year. It is named in honour of the Academy’s Royal Fellow, HRH The Princess Royal, acknowledging her exceptional role in championing engineering.   

Luke Logan FREng, Chair of the Academy’s Awards Committee, said:    

“The winners of The Princess Royal Silver Medal for 2025 are each leading lights in their fields. They have transformed cutting edge research into commercial success with their entrepreneurial leadership. They have also created technologies that have potential applications in multiple spheres that will have impact on future innovations for decades to come.”   

Professor Prodromakis is internationally recognised for his work on memristors – short for memory resistors. They are brain-mimicking devices that combine memory and processing in a single component. This is radically different to the way conventional computer chips work, which process and store data on separate units.    

“What conventional computer chips typically do is go and fetch the data from memory, bring it into the processing unit, do some number crunching, and then take the outcome of that and go back and store it in memory,” explains Professor Prodromakis. This process consumes more energy and slows computation.    

Memristors process information in a way that’s much closer to how the human brain works – efficiently, in parallel, and with minimal energy. Global electricity demand from data centres is projected to double by 2030 so this system offers a promising solution and could revolutionise the energy efficiency of artificial intelligence.   

Meeting the ‘father of memristors’ 

Professor Prodromakis has been working on this technology since meeting Leon Chua on a visiting professorship at Berkeley in 2010 funded by the Lindemann Trust. Chua is widely acknowledged as the ‘father of memristors’ and began his work on a theoretical level in 1971. When Themis returned to the UK, he began making and testing his early memristors in his lab at Imperial College London.    

His work has already had global impact. The testing tools developed by his spinout company, ArC Instruments, are now used in over 300 labs across 26 countries. These tools have accelerated the development of next-generation semiconductor technologies, helping to bring memristors closer to commercial adoption.   

Professor Prodromakis’ memristors are also compatible with existing CMOS manufacturing processes, making them more viable for integration into current chip production lines. This compatibility has attracted interest from major semiconductor foundries, including TSMC and ST Microelectronics.   

Future applications and ventures   

Beyond data centres, the potential applications of memristors are vast. Their low power consumption and resilience to radiation make them ideal for use in space, while their analogue nature could enable more precise brain-computer interfaces. In a recent breakthrough, Professor Prodromakis’s team successfully connected artificial neurons with living brain cells in rats, paving the way for more advanced neural implants.   

Looking ahead, Professor Prodromakis is launching the Edinburgh Venture Builder in AI hardware (EVA), a new initiative inspired by the legendary Bell Labs, to support the commercialisation of AI hardware innovations. “This has never been done for electronics and specifically AI hardware” he says, “so that’s why I’m quite excited about this new phase.”