James Digby Yarlet Collier FRS FREng^[2] (born December 1958) is a British physicist and engineer. He was the chief technology officer of Neul Limited.^[3] Previously, he held several technical and executive positions at Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR), UbiNetics, Cambridge Consultants and Schlumberger^[4][5][6]

Collier was born in December 1958.^[1] He was educated at the University of Oxford, where he gained a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics.^[5][when?]

Collier co-founded CSR as a corporate spin-off from Cambridge Consultants Limited with a group of eight other people including Glenn Collinson, Phil O'Donovan,^[7] Jonathan Kimmitt, Carl Orsborn, Ian Sabberton, Justin Penfold, Robert Young and Graham Pink.^[8] He served as CTO of CSR which was acquired by Qualcomm in 2015.^[6] Using short-range wireless technology, CSR became a major supplier of integrated circuit designs for Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi.^[8] As a fabless manufacturing company, CSR created the first production ready, single chip, CMOS implementation of the Bluetooth standard^[9] by putting a radio transmitter, microprocessor and baseband on a single integrated circuit.^[8] The techniques developed are now commonplace and included in many consumer wireless devices.^[2]

Between 1984 and 1999, Collier held executive and technical positions at Cambridge Consultants. Prior to 1984, Collier held a number of executive and technical positions at Schlumberger.^[9] Collier also served as director UbiNetics IP Ltd from 2005.^[1]

In 2010, Collier set up Neul Limited with Glenn Collinson with £8 million in initial investment to exploit machine to machine communication in the weightless wireless communications market.^[8] Neul was based in Cambridge Science Park and developed wireless network technology to enable the use of the white space spectrum.^[1][3][10] Neul had a change of management in 2013 after Collier was ousted by the investors.^[11] Neul was not successful in commercialising weightless technology^[12] and was later acquired by Huawei in 2014 for $25 million USD.^[3]

In 2005, Collier won the MacRobert Award with his CSR colleagues John Hodgson, Phil O'Donovan,^[7] Glenn Collinson and Chris Ladas for their work on Bluecore.^[13][14][15] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016^[2] and is also a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET) and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).^[5]