Manil Dev Gomony Successfully Defends PhD Thesis!

Today, Manil Dev Gomony has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Scalable and Bandwidth-Efficient Memory Subsystem Design for Real-Time Systems“. The thesis proposes an architecture for a real-time memory subsystem that scales well in terms of area and maximum synthesizable frequency with an increasing number of memory clients. This subsystem architecture comprises a memory interconnect called Globally Arbitrated Memory Tree (GAMT) a Multi-Channel Memory Controller (MCMC), as well as a technique to couple those components and have a single point of arbitration for both resources. The thesis also proposes a design flow for automatically choosing the memory device, mapping clients to memory channel, and configure arbiters to satisfy client requirements.

Among Manil’s achievements, we specifically highlight two achievements with respect to publishing. First of all, he had a paper accepted at the DATE conference every year during his PhD. Secondly, none of his publications were ever rejected anywhere. This shows that Manil managed to publish in competitive forums in his field and that his work was well-received. Currently, Manil works as a Researcher at Bell Laboratories of Alcatel-Lucent in Belgium. We wish him the best of luck in his future career!

First PhD Student Graduates From the Memory Team

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.

Davit Mirzoyan Successfully Defends PhD Thesis!

On this day, Davit Mirzoyan confidently defended his PhD thesis, earning the right to call himself a doctor. The thesis is entitled Better than Worst-Case Design for Streaming Applications under Process Variation and discusses how process variation during chip manufacturing can be exploited during application mapping and voltage-frequency island partitioning to increase the number of chips that satisfy the real-time requirements of the application. The work is very interesting, as it captures how variation in transistor parameters affect application performance, thus tying together the lowest and the highest levels of system design.

An interesting fact is that due to circumstances beyond Davits control, he had to write his thesis and send it off to the committee in only two months, something most people would not be able to do, yet he delivered a nice piece of work that was referred to as a ‘very smooth read’ by the committee. As Davits co-promotor, I am very proud of his achievement and I have very much enjoyed working with him during the past four years. I wish him the best of luck in his future career.

Karthik Chandrasekar Receives HiPEAC Collaboration Grant

Today, we celebrate that Karthik Chandrasekar has received a 3 month HiPEAC collaboration grant to visit the group of Prof. Norbert Wehn at Kaiserslautern Institute of Technology. The application process was competitive with approximately 30% of 67 proposals being funded. The grant serves to extend the existing collaboration between our two groups and will be used to conduct research on the hot topic of “Mobile and 3D-Stacked Wide I/O DRAM Power Modeling and Optimization”.