The system may be audio, computer, control, digital, or robotics, and it may be designed to accomplish a multitude of tasks, but the technology underlying it is based on electricity or electronics. Undergraduates at Iowa may specialize in particular areas of this broad field by choosing elective courses. Popular emphasis areas are computer engineering, electronics, telecommunications, applied physics, software engineering, and robotics. My colleagues in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are working on areas such as using computers for medical applications, improving medical diagnoses, and developing high-speed communication systems. My research concentrates on testing VLSI ships.
Microprocessors are an example of such chips.
The idea behind testing is to find out if the ships work as they should. Many things we see around us, such as computers, depend on these chips working correctly. It is important to develop testing procedures that will keep the cost down. Determining whether a chip works correctly is complex task. The run time of an accurate procedure grows so fast with the size of the chip, that it is impossible to test chips accurately unless they are very small or have some special properties.