News
Jul 22, 2011
UC Irvine Paper Accepted at CODES
Luis Bathen reports that CODES has accepted a paper titled "SPMVISOR: Dynamic Scratchpad Memory Virtualization for Secure, Low Power and High Performance, Distributed On-Chip Memories." Bathen's co-authors include Dongyun Shin, Sung-Soo Lim and Nikil Dutt. CODES+ISSS -- the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis -- is part of Embedded Systems Week, scheduled for Oct. 9-14 in Taipei, Taiwan.

Jun 5, 2011
SRC on Design-Dependent Process Monitoring
The Semiconductor Research Corp. issued a press release on "Design-Dependent Process Monitoring" for semiconductor wafer manufacturing. The work took place in UCLA's Nano CAD Lab and quoting Variability Expedition co-PI Puneet Gupta. According to the release, the "research promises semiconductor manufacturing cost and production savings up to 15 percent, potentially increasing profit per chip significantly." [more]

Jun 3, 2011
Phase Change Memory-Based Moneta System Points to Future of Computer Storage
A team led by Variability Expedition co-PI Steven Swanson and PI Rajesh Gupta, both at UCSD, is about to demonstrate a first-of-its-kind, phase-change memory solid state storage device that provides performance thousands of times faster than a conventional hard drive. Grad students working on the project include Variability's Arup De. [more]

May 26, 2011
Rakesh Kumar gives a Keynote talk at LPonTR, Norway.
Rakesh Kumar has been invited to be a Keynote Speaker at the 4th IEEE Workshop on Impact of Low Power Design on Test and Reliability (LPonTR) to be held on May 26th-27th in Trondheim, Norway. [more]

May 26, 2011
UCI Researcher Presents Work at DAC-Affiliated Poster Sessions
Luis A.D. Bathen, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Irvine affiliated with the Variability Expedition, will present his work at two events during the Design Automation Conference 2011, held in San Diego this year. On June 5 he'll present his poster, TrustGeM: Dynamic Trusted Environment Generation for Chip-Multiprocessors, at the 4th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). The research is co-authored by Variability investigator Nikil Dutt. Then on June 7, Bathen will present at the SIGDA-DAC PhD Forum. The title of his poster: SeReVraL: Secure, Reliable and Dynamic Virtualization Layer for On-Chip Distributed Memories. [more]

May 26, 2011
Rakesh Kumar gives a Keynote talk at IEEE/IFIP DSN, Hong Kong
Rakesh Kumar has been invited to give a Keynote at the Workshop on Dependable and Secure Nanocomputing (WDSN). The 2011 workshop will be held in conjunction with DSN (IEEE/IFIP Symposium on Dependable Systems and Networks) on June 26 in Hong Kong. [more]

May 25, 2011
EETimes: IBM to test wafer pruning
R. Colin Johnson reports in EETimes that a new wafer pruning technique developed at UCLA with funding from SRC is currently being characterized by IBM for its 45-nanometer process, using on-wafer monitoring structures that can be probed during fabrication to spot bad wafers early-on. UCLA's Puneet Gupta is quoted as saying 'wafer pruning ultimately leads to less expensive and higher performing electronics devices, especially if the pruning can be done during the early stages of manufacturing.' [more]

May 16, 2011
Co-PI Industry Interactions with STMicroelectronics
In March 2011, co-PI Dennis Sylvester from the University of Michigan visited STMicroelectronics in France. Subsequently, in March through May, Sylvester hosted a visitor from STMicroelectronics, Mehdi Saligane, to work on porting the lab's aging sensors to 32nm.

May 4, 2011
Mitra Student Wins Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award
Co-PI Subhasish Mitra at Stanford advised Nishant Patil, who was selected for the ACM SIGDA top Ph.D. dissertation of 2011. Patil's dissertation focused on 'Design and Fabrication of Imperfection-Immune Carbon Nanotube Digital VLSI Circuits'. He was cited for presenting design and processing techniques to overcome fundamental challenges in creating digital VLSI circuits using carbon nanotube field effect transistors (CNFETs). [more]

Apr 25, 2011
Puneet Gupta gives a tutorial at VLSI-DAT Symposium in Taiwan
co-PI Puneet Gupta from UCLA delivered a half-day tutorial at 2011 International Symposium on VLSI Design, Automation and Test in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Find the slides here http://nanocad.ee.ucla.edu/pub/Main/Publications/vlsidat_11.pdf [more]

Apr 1, 2011
UCSD Hosts Visits from Intel
PI Rajesh Gupta and Variability Executive Director Yuvraj Agarwal, both at UCSD, report that they hosted visits from several Intel groups in the first quarter. These included two visits by Intel Labs' Jaideep Chandrasekhar.

Mar 31, 2011
SEELab Hosts Industry Visitors in First Quarter
Co-PI Tajana Simunic Rosing reports that industry officials from Google, Oracle, Cisco and Intel visited her System Energy Efficiency Lab (SEE Lab) in the first quarter of 2011. In the same period Dr. Simunic Rosing reports having given presentations at Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Cisco. [more]

Mar 30, 2011
Mitra on Panel at Synopsys San Jose
Co-PI Subhasish Mitra of Stanford was an invited panelist at this San Jose conference. The topic: How Much Test Coverage Is Enough? [more]

Mar 18, 2011
Day-Long Seminar Held at EPFL
Forty attendees drawn from CCMX Center at EPFL, ETZ and Variability Expeditions were on hand at EPFL for this day-long seminar. Expedition participants included Lucas Wanner, Dennis Sylvester, Tajana Rosing, Subhashish Mitra, Puneet Gupta, Nikil Dutt and Rajesh Gupta. The participants discussed a range of topics related to Variability, its causes and characterization, and how system design can be made robust against such variations. [more]

Mar 18, 2011
UCLA/UIUC Team Releases Aging Simulator
In the first quarter of 2011, the team led by UCLA's Puneet Gupta and UIUC's Rakesh Kumar released an open-source aging simulator, part of their development of a first-principles model of aging (especially NBTI) flexible enough to use at architecture level. The simulator can take arbitrary workloads, voltage schedules, etc. Both a Matlab and C++ versions have been released (see link). The researchers showed that in most cases, for long-lifetime systems (5 years+), the benefits of dynamic reliability management (dynamic voltage scaling, activity management with scheduling, power gating, etc.) are fairly limimted when compared to just traditional guardbanding approaches. [more]

Mar 16, 2011
Expedition Members to Speak at Nanosystem Design and Variability Workshop at EPFL
Half a dozen investigators from the Variability Expedition will participate in this conference at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland on March 18. Speakers will include Expedition PIs Dennis Sylvester, Subhashish Mitra, Rajesh Gupta, Puneet Gupta, Nikil Dutt and Tajana Simunic Rosing. [more]