Energy Efficient Inter-Chip Communication in Heterogeneous Application Domains
Content of the lecture:
The energy spent for data transfer within integrated systems has followed a rather ascending trajectory, particularly, as strides in technology scaling have steadily improved the energy requirements for compute. Consequently, from high-performance to low-end applications, energy for data transfers emerges as a potential bottleneck. This lecture, therefore, offers an overview of state-of-the-art techniques used at the transistor level to overcome this important challenge and also discusses more recent methods that are well-suited for diverse application domains, including high performance computing and emerging consumer electronics. In addition to the primary objective of energy-efficiency, the lecture covers other issues, such as cost and real world constraints that affect the development of these methods offering holistic insight into this important topic. The application of these techniques to novel computing architectures and integration paradigms are described through past and on-going EC-H2020 projects. The lecture is suited for postgraduate and senior graduate students, who want to deepen their knowledge in energy-efficient inter-chip communication methods at the physical and logical layer of the communication stack.
Teacher: Prof. Vasilis Pavlidis
Vasilis F. Pavlidis is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. He holds an MSc and PhD degree from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, obtained in 2003 and 2008, respectively, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 2008 to 2012, he was a post-doc at the Integrated Systems Laboratory of EPFL, Switzerland. He has 10+ years of research experience in the areas of on-chip interconnect modelling and design and emerging technologies, such as 3-D integration. He is the leading author of the book Three-Dimensional Integrated Circuit Design, (1st and 2nd Editions) and contributor to the software tool, Manchester Thermal Analyzer. He has delivered over 20 invited talks in academia, research centers, and industry including a 5-day course at the University of Beihang, China.