Sir Christopher Maxwell Snowden, FRS, , FIET (born 1956) is a British electronic engineer and academic.
[3] Snowden studied electronic and electrical engineering at the University of Leeds, gaining a BSc in 1977, and an MSc and PhD in 1982.
[7] Under his leadership, Surrey considered introducing metric measurement of staff performance based on the number of students achieving 60% or above[8] and later considered a new threshold that staff needed to reach in student evaluations (3.8 out of 5) if they were to avoid being targeted for special measures.
[2] From November 2012 to August 2013, Snowden held one of the vice-president positions of UUK, representing England and Northern Ireland, and from 2009 to 2011 he chaired their Employability, Business and Industry Policy Committee.
On 20 March 2015, the University of Southampton announced[16] that Snowden would become its new Vice Chancellor following the retirement of Professor Don Nutbeam, a move which took effect from October 2015.
[17] In June 2017 Snowden spoke out against the Teaching Excellence Framework which had given Southampton University a Bronze rating, calling it "fundamentally flawed" and having "no value or credibility".
[19] Snowden released a statement thanking those within the institution who had contributed and stating that the rating was an assurance to students that their experience at the University of Southampton will translate into excellent graduate outcomes.
[25] There was additional criticism of a substantial pay increase, including by UCU general Secretary Sally Hunt.
[27] The Chair of the University of Southampton's Council Gill Rider defended Snowden's level of remuneration as reflecting his experience.
He pioneered the application of numerical physical device models to comprehensively describe electron transport in microwave transistor operation and in particular investigating device-circuit interaction properties.
[30] He also contributed to the development of new non-linear laser diode models, which found particular application in emerging high data rate communication systems.
[31][32] During the mid-1980s, along with colleagues in Lille and Duisburg universities, he explored the potential for a new class of physical model, which became known as the quasi-two-dimensional (Q2D) approach.
[33] This was shown to be extremely effective at modelling field-effect transistors, such as the popular metal semiconductor FET (MESFET).
Snowden's models were shown to have the ability to accurately predict the DC and RF performance based on the physical geometry and material properties available from fabrication data.
[38] It was shown to be an effective method for modelling and designing AlGaAs/GaAs HEMTs and the important pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistors (pHEMTs) based on InGaAs/GaAs systems.
New designs of power pHEMT (some with capabilities of over 100W at 2 GHz) were developed and fabricated using this knowledge, which achieved high breakdown voltages while retaining excellent signal gain at microwave frequencies.
[41][42] During 1990 to 1997, Snowden developed a new electrothermal physics-based equivalent circuit model for heterojunction bipolar transistors, which was suited to power amplifier applications (widely used in cellular handsets).
During his time at M/A-COM whilst working as Senior Staff Scientist he extended their glass microwave integrated circuit (GMIC) technology to photonics, introducing the concept of embedding light guides in the GMIC to allow photonic circuits and interfaces to solid-state lasers, detectors and high speed processors.
[55] In 2014 he was invited to be Deputy Chairman of the 2015 judging panel for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize)[56] and is now the chair.
[64] The Royal Academy of Engineering[54] awarded him their Silver Medal for 'Outstanding Personal Contributions to the UK Microwave Semiconductor Industry' in 2004.