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This year, ES 271r is about variability: process, voltage and temperature variability and their effects on computing systems.

Here's an overview of the course: overview.pdf

Contents

Course outline

Overview of Variations

  1. Technology scaling and process variations
    • understand the underlying mechanisms (device physics) of why process variations are getting worse as technology scales
    • understand die-to-die and within die variations
  2. Voltage variations
    • understand why high-performance microprocessors suffer from voltage variations -- look at the power delivery subsystem
    • see if splitting up the power domain helps or doesn't help
  3. Temperature variations
    • high temperature is bad, but in modern uP's, temperature is NOT constant, but varies across the chips.

Circuits and impact of and solution to variations

  1. Impact of variations on uP's
    • Bowman's work
    • Intel's Foxton technology
    • Variable pipelining (variable latency)
    • Alex's ISSCC submission (and ISCA submission?)
  2. On-chip memories
    • Lecture: Brief overview of on-chip memories
    • see why PVT variations degrade 6T cell reliability and performance
    • Traditional solutions: 8T, split power, etc.
    • read 3T1D memory papers and see if they may be a good alternative
  3. Power supplies
    • we will diverge for a bit to look at current trends in power supply design, but this may come later
    • read Wonyoung's ASGI and HPCA papers

Architecture

  1. Understanding and techniques to deal with voltage emergencies at the architecture level
    • read papers from Powell, Joseph, Meeta, etc.
  2. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling
    • Lecture: why DVFS is interesting
    • maybe read papers on GALS
  3. Using 3T1D as a safer alternative
    • Alex's ASGI and MICRO paper

Dynamic optimization

  1. Lecture: what is dynamic optimization?
  2. how can dynamic optimization be used in the context of variability?
  3. others?


Meeting time and location

ES 271r will meet on Monday and Wednesday afternoons from 4:30 to 6:00 in Maxwell Dworkin 323.

First assignment

Read the first three papers on the Papers page.

Getting used to the wiki

Consult the User's Guide and MediaWiki FAQ for information on using the wiki software.

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