He attended Worthing Technical High School, then went on to Loughborough University in Leicestershire, and graduated with a first-class BSc honours degree in electrical engineering in 1975.
[2][3][4][7][8] He also worked for a year as cofounder and Director of the LSI design house Denyer-Walmsley Microelectronics Ltd.[2] In 1980 Denyer became a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where he carried out a series of research projects and held multiple consultancies.
Carver Mead, a leading figure in VLSI research, said at the time that Denyer was "one of a handful of most creative and innovative workers in the VLSI field...There are, world-wide, perhaps two or three people of any age that combine a comparable depth of scientific understanding, with a demonstrated capability to subject their ideas to real, experimental verification."
He also held extensive consultancies, including with BT, BP, Thorn-EMI ESA, Shlumberger and, with colleagues, gave short courses to industry.
His next step was to secure funding for the Silicon Architectures Research Initiative, a 30-man joint programme between the University and seven supporting companies, which he led.
This effort resulted in the world's first single-chip CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) video camera, completed in 1989 and described in a paper published that year by Denyer and his colleagues David Renshaw, Lu Mingying, and Wang Guoyo.
In order to develop this technology in a commercial direction, to invent a variety of devices making use of it, to sell single-chip video cameras, and to ensure that they maintained their intellectual rights to the products deriving from their research, Denyer and Renshaw established VLSI Vision Ltd (VVL) in 1990 with the help of financial support from the university and from venture capitalists.
"One day I would be deep inside the circuit that was going to reduce noise levels by two electrons, the next I was schmoozing City fund managers.
He then began to focus on helping young academics with potentially commercial ideas to establish start-ups and attract investors.
He also co-founded and served as chairman of the firm MicroEmissive Displays (MED), which was based at the Scottish Microelectronics Centre on the campus of the University of Edinburgh and was the world's leading developer of polymer organic light-emitting-diode (P-OLED)-based microdisplays.
[2][3] According to science writer Michael Kenward, Denyer was driven to entrepreneurship less by the profit motive than by the belief that his work could not change things if handed over "to the slowly grinding wheels of ponderous big companies.
[2] Denyer died of cancer and was survived by his wife, Fiona, daughters Kate and Kirsty, father, mother and two brothers, Geoff and Barry.
For a long time he held the patent for the chip behind every digital camera – he sold the company many years ago.
He became an enthusiastic yachtsman, sailing his yacht Tigger Too, which was moored at Ardfern, Lochgilphead, off the west coast of Scotland and in the Mediterranean.