Today, Karthik Chandrasekar was promoted to doctor as he confidently defended his PhD thesis “High-Level Power Estimation and Optimization of DRAMs”. The thesis proposes a high-level power estimation tool called DRAMPowerthat estimates the power and energy consumption of different generations of DRAMs based on a memory command trace and current values from the memory datasheet. Since current numbers in datasheets are often pessimistic for a majority of the manufactured memory devices, a methodology is also proposed to characterize DRAM modules post-manufacturing to achieve more accurate power and performance estimates for the characterized devices. Lastly, the thesis discusses power optimization in the context of real-time memory controllers and proposes two power-down strategies to reduce the power consumption of memories in real-time systems without sacrificing worst-case performance.
The defense went very well and the committee was particularly pleased with how the DRAMPower tool was verified using measurements on real hardware and how it has attracted interest from industry. Karthik is the first PhD student to graduate from the Memory Team and the rest of the team wishes him all the best for his future career at Nvidia.
