News
Mar 7, 2011
Variability Outreach Director at UCSD Demonstrates OptIPortable Displays for Underserved Communities
The UCSD outreach manager for the Variability Expedition recently demonstrated a new portable tiled display wall that will help UCSD undergrads to engage K-12 learners from underserved communities in southeast San Diego. “I didn't know what an OptIPortable was until a month ago and now I'm showing others how to use them,” says Naderi, who now leads the outreach program at UCSD for the Variability Expedition, an NSF-funded program that is exploring variability-aware software for efficient computing with nanoscale devices -- and is bringing hands-on experience with embedded systems and software to K-12 classrooms, especially in underserved communities. “This is proof of how user-friendly these devices are," she noted. It's one of several programs that Variability Expedition can use to excite young learners in science careers. [more]

Mar 7, 2011
Expedition Members to Speak at Nanosystem Design and Variability Workshop on March 18
Several PIs from the Variability Expedition will participate in this conference at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Speakers will include Expedition PIs Dennis Sylvester, Subhashish Mitra, Rajesh Gupta, Puneet Gupta, Nikil Dutt and Tajana Simunic Rosing. [more]

Feb 25, 2011
UMich's Dennis Sylvester Quoted in The Times of India
In a report from London, the newspaper notes that scientists have created what they claim is the world's smallest computer system -- one square millimeter in size -- that fits into an eyeball to monitor pressure to treat glaucoma. Variability Expedition co-PI Dennis Sylvester (University of Michigan) is one of the chip's creators. He is quoted saying that "the next big challenge is to achieve millmeter-scale systems, which have a host of new applications for monitoring our bodies, our environment and buildings. Because they're so small, you could manufacture hundreds of thousands on one wafer. [more]

Feb 19, 2011
Keynote Speech at ASPDAC 2011
Professor Subhasish Mitra presented a keynote speech at the 16th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASPDAC), which was held at Yokohama, Japan in January 2011. His talk, titled 'Robust Systems: from Clouds to Nanotubes,' summarizes significant recent progress in robust system design that impacts almost every aspect of future electronic systems, from ultra-large-scale networked systems, all the way to their nanoscale components. [more]

Feb 18, 2011
Invited Talk at IEEE Circuits and Systems Society CAS-Fest
In mid-December 2010, Subhasish Mitra delivered an invited talk to a new forum on emerging and selected topics, CAS-FEST, in connection with ICECS 2010 in Athens, Greece. His presentation, co-authored with Kevin Brelsford, Young Moon Kim, Yanjing Li and Hsiao-Heng Kelin Lee, was on "Robust System Design to Overcome CMOS Reliability Challenges". [more]

Feb 17, 2011
Puneet Gupta Talks in Vancouver and Ann Arbor
UCLA's Puneet Gupta delivered talks on the theme of "Looking 'Up' for Enabling Moore's Law" in October 2010. The talks were presented at the University of British Columbia Oct. 10, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor on Oct. 18.

Feb 17, 2011
Keynote Talk at 2010 VLSI-SoC
Stanford's Subhasish Mitra delivered a presentation at the 18th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on VLSI and System-on-Chip (VLSI-SoC) in Madrid on September 27, 2010. The keynote talk explored "Robust System Design for Scaled CMOS and Beyond." [more]

Feb 17, 2011
Inter-University Student Exchanges
The Variability Expedition aims to encourage exchanges across campuses. This quarter UCLA graduate student Lucas Wanner visited UC San Diego as part of the Variability student exchange program and presented a talk on his work in the reading group.

Feb 16, 2011
UCSD Interaction with Intel
Jaideep Chandrashekhar from Intel Labs visited UCSD twice this quarter as a part of our collaborations related to power measurements on Intel platforms.

Dec 22, 2010
Kumar Guest Edits IEEE Journals
UIUC's Rakesh Kumar served as a Guest Editor of the IEEE Embedded Systems Letters for the Special Issue on Reliable Embedded Computing, which came out in December 2010. Kumar has also been invited to be a Guest Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, for the special issue on New Software/Hardware Paradigms for Error-Tolerant Multimedia Systems. The special issue is due out in November 2011.

Nov 17, 2010
Sylvester Invited to Seminar Organized by SRC
Co-PI Dennis Sylvester (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) in mid-November addressed an e-workshop on 'Designing for Robustness and Low Power'. The event was organized by the Semiconductor Research Corporation's Focus Center Research Program.

Sep 24, 2010
Paper Receives Intel/CICC Student Scholarship Award
A paper on 'Dynamic NBTI management using a 45nm multi-degradation sensor' delivered to the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conferenc in September 2010 received the Intel/CICC Student Scholarship Award. Co-authors included UMich's D. Sylvester, P. Singh and D. Blaauw, as well as Intel's E. Karl. [more]

Aug 23, 2010
Variability Expedition News Release
NSF Funds Expedition into Software for Efficient Computing in the Age of Nanoscale Devices [more]

Aug 19, 2010
NSF News Release
NSF Announces New Expeditions in Computing Awards [more]

Jul 15, 2010
ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award 2010
The ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) Outstanding New Faculty Award went to Variability co-PI Puneet Gupta of UCLA. The award recognizes a junior faculty member early in his/her academic career, who demonstrates outstanding potential as an educator and/or researchers in the field of electronic design automation.

Apr 29, 2010
IEEE VLSI Test Symposium Best Paper Award
At the 2010 VLSI Test Symposium in Santa Cruz, Calif., in April 2010, co-PI Subhasish Mitra and his graduate student Yanjing Li, together with Onur Mutlu (Carnegie Mellon) and Donald Gardner (Intel), were awarded the Best Paper, for their work on 'Concurrent Autonomous Self-Test for Uncore Components in SoCs'. [more]