Eben Upton


Eben Christopher Upton is a British technical director and ASIC architect for Broadcom. He is also a founder and former trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and now CEO of Raspberry Pi Ltd., the wholly owned subsidiary which runs the engineering and trading activities of the Foundation. He is responsible for the overall software and hardware architecture of the Raspberry Pi device.

Life

He is the son of Clive Upton, born in Griffithstown near Pontypool in South Wales; he lived in Lae in Papua New Guinea between the ages of eight weeks and two and a half years. He then returned to the UK to grow up in Leeds, Birmingham and Ilkley.
Upton completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics and Engineering in 1999 at the University of Cambridge where he was an undergraduate student at St John's College, Cambridge. He went on to do the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science graduating in 2001. After his diploma, Upton was a research student in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. After finishing his Ph.D. he took a Master of Business Administration at the Cambridge Judge Business School while working in industry.

Career

Before working at Broadcom, Upton was Director of Studies in Computer Science at St John's College, Cambridge, with responsibility for undergraduate admissions. During his academic career, he co-authored papers on mobile services, Human–computer interaction, bluetooth and data dependency graphs. He has been a visiting Researcher at Intel Corporation, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Ideaworks3D and a software engineer at IBM.

Works

Upton has published books including the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary with his father Clive Upton. With Gareth Halfacree he co-authored the Raspberry Pi User Guide.

Awards and honours

Upton has won a number of awards including the Innovators Under 35 from MIT Technology Review in 2012 and the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal.
Upton was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to business and education.
In 2020, he was awarded the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award.

Personal life

Upton is married to Liz whom he met at university.
Upton's 1st child - Christopher "Kit" Arthur Upton, born on 7th May 2020.