Oğuz Ergin

Oğuz Ergin is a Turkish computer scientist and computer engineer whose research focuses on computer architecture, microprocessor design and integrated circuit design. He is a professor in the department of computer engineering at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and, on leave, at the TOBB University of Economics and Technology (TOBB ETÜ) in Ankara, Turkey, where he founded and led the Kasırga Microprocessors Laboratory.

Education and early career

Ergin received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Middle East Technical University in 2000. He then moved to the United States, where he earned Master of Science (2003) and Doctor of Philosophy (2005) degrees in computer science from Binghamton University (the State University of New York at Binghamton). During 2004 and 2005 he worked as a senior researcher at the Intel Barcelona Research Center in Spain.

Career

Ergin joined the department of computer engineering at TOBB ETÜ in January 2006 and was subsequently promoted to full professor; he also served as head of the department. In 2006 he established the Kasırga Microprocessors Laboratory at the university, a research group working on computer hardware including memory technologies, hardware accelerators, FPGA-based designs, low-power design and fault tolerance.

He held a visiting position as associate professor at the University of Notre Dame in 2014 and was a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh from 2015 to 2016. He later served as a visiting professor at ETH Zurich, where he collaborated with the SAFARI research group. Since 2024 he has been a professor in the department of computer engineering at the University of Sharjah while remaining on leave from TOBB ETÜ.

Research

Ergin's research spans computer architecture and microprocessor design, register file and low-power hardware design, fault-tolerant and soft error-resilient circuits, DRAM, FPGA-based test and evaluation infrastructure, true random number generation and RISC-V processor design. His work has appeared at venues including the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) and the International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA); among his contributions are QUAC-TRNG, a high-throughput DRAM-based true random number generator presented at ISCA 2021, and DR-STRaNGe, a system design for DRAM-based true random number generators presented at HPCA 2022. According to Google Scholar, his publications have been cited more than 3,000 times.

Kasırga laboratory and TEKNOFEST

Through the Kasırga Microprocessors Laboratory, Ergin has supervised undergraduate and graduate students on microprocessor design projects. Under his mentorship, student teams from the laboratory designed original RISC-V-based processors that won top awards in the chip design competition of TEKNOFEST, Turkey's aerospace and technology festival. At the 2022 TEKNOFEST Karadeniz event the Kasırga team placed first in the digital category, which the university reported as the highest-scoring entry among 912 teams. At TEKNOFEST 2023, teams from the laboratory—named Kasırga Kızıl, Kasırga Gök and Kasırga Gün—took the first, second and third places in the digital processor design category, with a further team receiving an honourable mention in the image-processing design category.

Writing and public engagement

Ergin is the author of an open-access Turkish-language computer architecture textbook, Bilgisayar Mimarisi: RISC-V Tabanlı Yaklaşım ("Computer Architecture: A RISC-V Based Approach"), released under a Creative Commons license. He is active in science communication, producing lectures and videos on computer hardware and technology, and has written as a columnist for the Turkish opinion platform Daktilo 1984.

Selected publications

• Ergin, Oğuz. Bilgisayar Mimarisi: RISC-V Tabanlı Yaklaşım. Open-access textbook. .
• "QUAC-TRNG: High-Throughput True Random Number Generation Using Quadruple Row Activation in Commodity DRAM Chips", International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2021.
• "DR-STRaNGe: End-to-End System Design for DRAM-based True Random Number Generators", International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2022.

External links

• Oğuz Ergin at Google Scholar