Solid State Circuits Society

April 21, 2005

Our speaker was  Professor Mircea R. Stan (University of Virginia), and the topic of his presentation was
” Power-aware and temperature-aware circuit design“

Abstract

Power-aware design techniques aim to maximize performance under power dissipation and power consumption constraints; this scenario is common for high-performance systems. At the other extreme, low-power design techniques try to reduce power or energy consumption in portable equipment for some desired performance or throughput target. All the power consumed by a system gets eventually dissipated and transformed into heat: the power and related thermal issues affect performance, packaging, reliability, power delivery, environmental, and heat removal costs. Temperature is proportional to power density, not just power, so methods to reduce thermal effects can try either to reduce power, or increase area, or both. A thermal model is needed to accurately estimate the temperature landscape. This presentation will span power-aware and temperature-aware design techniques at the circuit level. First there will be some generic results related to figures of merit for power-aware and temperature-aware design and related optimal voltages, followed by issues related to electro-thermal simulation and necessary modeling aspects. This will be followed by the introduction of the concept of temperature-adaptive circuit design with some results that show increased performance across a wide temperature-range. Some issues related to active cooling and electro-thermal simulation with active cooling will be followed by thermal modeling requirements at the circuit level and the inclusion of thermal aspects in a temperature-aware design flow. Finally, if there is time, the presentation will end with a few recent results in the implementation of efficient bus-encoding circuits for power-aware SOC.

Lecturer Biography

Mircea R. Stan received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Diploma in Electronics and Communications from “Politehnica” University in Bucharest, Romania. Since 1996 he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia, where he is now an associate professor. Professor Stan is teaching and doing research in the areas of high-performance and low-power VLSI, mixed-mode analog and digital circuits, computer arithmetic, embedded systems, and nanoelectronics. He has more than eight years of industrial experience, and has been a visiting faculty at IBM in 2000 and at Intel in 2002 and 1999. Doctor Stan has received the NSF CAREER Award in 1997 and was a co-author on Best Paper Award at ISCA 2003 and SHAMAN 2002. He is a technical program chair for ISLPED 2005, was the general chair for GLSVLSI 2003 and has been on the technical committees for many conferences. He has been a Guest Editor for IEEE Computer in 2003 and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on CAS-I since 2003 and for IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems in 2001-2002. He is a senior member of the IEEE, a member of ACM, Usenix, and also of Eta Kappa Nu, Phi Kappa Phi and Sigma Xi. Professor Stan is currently on a sabbatical leave at UC Berkeley, working on ultra low-power circuit design with professor Jan Rabaey in the Berkeley Wireless Research Center.

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