Bio: Alex Orailoglu joined the UCSD faculty in 1987. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1983, and did his undergraduate work at Harvard University. Orailoglu is a program committee member for several international conferences, including the International Test Conference (1997-2002) and the IEEE VLSI Test Symposium (1997-2002). He has over 80 publications to his name and has done research projects sponsored by the NSF as well as numerous private companies including Intel, Conexant, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and National Semiconductor.

Research: Professor Orailoglu leads the Reliable System Synthesis Group at UCSD. With the pervasiveness of ever-smaller and more powerful microchips, there is a huge need for new techniques to test the reliability of integrated circuits. Orailoglu works on processes to test, verify, and ultimately repair ICs, particularly very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits. This includes RTL testability analysis, reconfiguration and repair as well as formal verification of VLSI circuits, automatic synthesis of fault-tolerant ICs, and tests of digital signal processing. Orailoglu's current projects also focus on cutting-edge technologies such as systems-on-chip (SoC) and embedded processors. As more and more electronic solutions arise such as networking, wireless communications, and visual imaging, there is a need for customizable, reconfigurable embedded computer processors to accommodate the various niches. The challenge is to keep the volume benefits of generic, general-purpose processors but create an adaptable processor which is suitable to a variety of applications. With funding from NSF, Orailoglu is attempting to lay the foundation for a new type of embedded computer processor 'microarchitecture' that is cost effective while providing flexibility to various devices and applications.