Category: Past Projects

Our research aims to develop technical approaches for improving energy efficiency in the enterprise computing systems and data centers ranging from server-level power/thermal management to energy balancing and HVAC control in the data center to application software with builtin power tuning levers. This is a critically important topic with many different beneficiaries and players and…

Sponsor: National Science Foundation – Computer Systems Research Project Summary: Peak power dissipation and the resulting temperature rise have become the dominant limiting factors to processor performance and a significant component of its design cost. Expensive packaging and heat removal solutions are needed to achieve acceptable substrate and interconnect temperatures in high-performance microprocessors. Current thermal…

Sponsor: National Science Foundation – Computer Systems Research Project Summary: One of the key problems confronting computer system designers is the management and conservation of energy sources. This challenge is evident in a number of ways. The goal may be to extend the battery lifetime in a computer system comprising of a processor and a…

Sponsor: National Science Foundation – Computing Processes and Artifacts Project Summary: Display components have become a key focus of efforts for maximization of the battery lifetime in a wide range of portable, display-equipped, microelectronic systems and products. A particularly effective technique in reducing the power consumption of all kinds of displays is the dynamic backlight…

Sponsor: National Science Foundation – Computing Processes and Artifacts Project Summary: The semiconductor industry’s $261 B in 2006 revenue does not accurately reflect its crucial role in enabling a $47 T ($61 T on a PPP basis) world economy to thrive and grow. This industry underpins the systems and technologies on which the people and…

Sponsor: Seminconductor Research Corp. Project Summary The down scaling of layout geometries to 45nm and below has resulted in a significant increase in the packing density and the operational frequency of VLSI circuits. The conventional static timing analysis (STA) techniques model signal transitions as saturated ramps with known arrival and transition times and propagate these timing…

Partial support from the National Science Foundation Project Summary: Utilizing multiple voltage domains (also known as voltage island) is one of the most effective techniques to minimize the overall power dissipation – both dynamic and leakage – while meeting a performance constraint. In a system designed with multiple voltage domains, the power delivery network (PDN)…

Partial support from the National Science Foundation Project Summary: In many modern microprocessors, caches occupy a large portion of the die. For example, in Intel’s Itanium 2 Montecito processor, more than 80% of the die is dedicated to caches. Since the leakage power dissipation is roughly proportional to the area of a circuit, the leakage…

Support from miscellaneous sources Project Summary: In many new designs, the leakage component of power consumption is comparable to the dynamic component. Many reports indicate that, in sub-65 nm CMOS technology node, 40% or even higher percentage of the total power consumption is due to the leakage of transistors and this percentage will increase with…

Project Summary: Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have gained considerable attention in applications where spatially distributed events are to be monitored. Recent technological advances have led to the emergence of small battery-powered sensors with considerable processing and communication capabilities. We consider a distributed, hierarchical wireless sensor network of energy-constrained nodes. Each node in this network has…