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Nathan Bleier

Nathan Bleier

Assistant Professor, University of Michigan EECS

nbleier@umich.eduGoogle ScholarORCID

Computer Architecture Hardware for AI Electronic Design Automation Orbital Computing

Nathaniel Bleier is an Assistant Professor in the University of Michigan's EECS department, where he leads the Crucible Computing Group (CCG). His research builds computing systems for domains whose constraints conventional silicon platforms cannot meet — whether the binding constraint is cost, physical form, power, radiation, or the economics of fabricating a chip at all. The group's work runs from printed and flexible electronics costing fractions of a cent, through novel sensing substrates such as earable and olfactory computing, to datacenters in orbit.

Two directions dominate the group's recent work. The first is computing in space: beginning with Space Microdatacenters (MICRO 2023) and continuing through system-level orbital datacenter architecture (HPCA 2025), orbital open RAN for non-terrestrial networks, and an architectural analysis of orbital AI datacenters (MICRO 2026), the group asks what a datacenter becomes when power, cooling, launch mass, and radiation set the limits rather than floor space and electricity prices. The second is automating the design of bespoke hardware. Rather than hand-tuning one accelerator at a time, the group builds tools that search the design space directly: program synthesis and equality saturation to co-design application-specific processors with their ISAs (ISCA 2026), chiplet-ecosystem and accelerator codesign frameworks (MICRO 2026), and MLIR-based lifting of tensor-level ISA semantics from accelerator RTL alongside reinforcement-learned adaptive routing for chiplet-based systems (ICCAD 2026). Increasingly these meet: extreme environments demand bespoke silicon, and bespoke silicon is only practical if its design can be automated.

This work has produced multiple chip tape-outs in both silicon and flexible electronics technologies, including RISC-V processors, flexible microprocessors, and neural network accelerators. It has been published at the top venues in computer architecture and design automation (ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, DAC, DATE, ICCAD) and increasingly beyond them: the group's work showing that stochastic computing acts as a dense adaptive quantizer appears at NeurIPS 2026. The work has been recognized with an ISCA 25-Year Retrospective selection, an ISCA Best Paper nomination, an IEEE Top Picks Honorable Mention, and a Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Space Computing (2026), and has had industrial impact through a licensing agreement with ARM Research. The group's work on sub-cent flexible microprocessors was highlighted as a top semiconductor story of 2022 by IEEE Spectrum.

Before academia, Nathan served six years in the U.S. Army Infantry (Ranger, Airborne, CIB). He holds a BS in Computer Engineering and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

4
current PhD students
4
former students
3
placed in PhD programs

Current PhD students

Where my students are now

  • Jirong Yang (Undergraduate Researcher, 2024–2026)
    now PhD Student at University of Texas
  • Kangqi "Amos" Zhang (Undergraduate Researcher, 2024–2026)
    now PhD Student at Purdue University
  • Linus Wang (Undergraduate Researcher, 2025–2026)
    now PhD Student at University of Michigan
  • Yunpeng Liu (Masters Student, 2024–2026)
    now Hardware Engineer at Apple

Publications

Authors in bold are students I advise or have advised.

Conference papers (21)

2026

2025

2023

2022

  • FlexiCores
    Nathaniel Bleier, Calvin Lee, Francisco Rodriguez, Antony Sou, Scott White, Rakesh Kumar
    Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (2022)
    PDFBibTeXDOI
  • Rethinking programmable earable processors
    Nathaniel Bleier, Muhammad Husnain Mubarik, Srijan Chakraborty, Shreyas Kishore, Rakesh Kumar
    Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (2022)
    PDFBibTeXDOI

2021

2020

  • Printed Microprocessors
    Nathaniel Bleier, Muhammad Husnain Mubarik, Farhan Rasheed, Jasmin Aghassi-Hagmann, Mehdi B Tahoori, Rakesh Kumar
    2020 ACM/IEEE 47th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)
    PDFBibTeXDOI
  • Printed Machine Learning Classifiers
    Muhammad Husnain Mubarik, Dennis D. Weller, Nathaniel Bleier, Matthew Tomei, Jasmin Aghassi-Hagmann, Mehdi B. Tahoori, Rakesh Kumar
    2020 53rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)
    PDFBibTeXDOI

Journal articles (2)

2026

2024

Patents & preprints (2)

2025

2023

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