April 30, 2012 — Janak H. Patel, research professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delivered a Bradley Distinguished Lecture on April 27, discussing present and future CMOS process variations.

Patel was a founding technical advisor to Nexgen Microsystems — a company bought by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for their microprocessor work. He was also one of the founders of Sunrise Tech, a successful startup CAD company for chip testing, later bought by Synopsys.

His research contributions include pipeline scheduling, cache coherence, cache simulation, interconnection networks, on-line error detection, reliability analysis of memories with error-correction coding and scrubbing, design for testability, built-in self-test, fault simulation and automatic test generation.

Patel earned a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Gujarat University, India, and a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. He received his Master of Science and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE and a recipient of the 1998 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award for "contributions to test generation and computer architecture."