W02 Emerging Memory Solutions - Technology, Manufacturing, Architectures, Design and Test

Prof. Bruce Jacob:

Bruce Jacob is a Keystone Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and former Director of Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland in College Park. He received the AB degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1988 and the MS and PhD degrees in CSE from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1995 and 1997, respectively. He holds several patents in the design of circuits for electric guitars and started a company around them. He also worked for two successful startup companies in the Boston area: Boston Technology and Priority Call Management. At Priority Call Management he was the initial system architect and chief engineer. He is a recipient of a US National Science Foundation CAREER award for his work on DRAM, and he is the lead author of an absurdly large book on the topic of memory systems. His research interests include system architectures, memory systems, operating systems, and electric guitars.

Abstract: New computing applications demand increased system capability, but the end of Moore's Law scaling also means the end of traditional approaches based on scaling conventional general-purpose computing architectures. New architectures and accompanying circuit implementations are required to develop efficient specialized chips for different markets. To provide for ultimate energy efficiency in a broad scope of applications ranging from future mobile clients to warehouse-scale computers (WSCs), the new architectures will optimally utilize a computing substrate based on ultimately scaled CMOS and some of the key emerging device, interconnect and memory technologies. While workloads are constantly changing, the underlying computational primitives are not. The 13 Berkeley computational motifs as the key computational kernels across a wide range of current and emerging applications. By optimally implementing specialized engines for these motifs, including both computation and data movement, optimal energy efficiency can be achieved over a broad range of application domains and underlying technologies.  This talk presents approaches to implementing specialized computing platforms and presents the role of traditional and emerging memory technologies in them.

Bio: Borivoje Nikolić is the National Semiconductor Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.  He received the Dipl.Ing. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1992 and 1994,  respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Davis in 1999. His research activities include digital, analog and RF integrated circuit design and communications and signal processing systems. He is co-author of the book Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective, 2nd ed, Prentice-Hall, 2003.