[1] Faris received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in 1969, 1971 and 1976 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, from the University of California, Berkeley.

[2] Upon graduating from Berkeley Faris joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center labs in Yorktown, NY, and became part of a group working on developing chips exploiting the Josephson effect.

[8] In the fall of 1983 IBM shut down its efforts to develop chips based on superconductive Josephson junctions, as did Bell Labs and Sperry at around the same time.

[3][12] In 1990 Faris founded Reveo with a vision of following Thomas Edison's model of applying science to generate new products, and spinning them out into new companies.

[11] As of 2008, Reveo was developing a single molecule DNA sequencing technology that used physical probes, each tuned to one of four frequencies, to sense nucleotides.