Electrical and Computer Engineering

Wu, Marculescu Win Best Paper Award at Computer Design Conference

October 3, 2008

ECE graduate student Kai-Chiang (Alex) Wu and his Ph.D. advisor, associate professor Diana Marculescu, have won a Best Paper Award in the EDA category at the 2008 IEEE Conference on Computer Design. The paper, titled "Power-Aware Soft Error Hardening via Selective Voltage Scaling," will be presented at the conference, which will be held October 12-15 in California.

With continuous technology scaling such as shrinking device sizes, radiation-induced soft errors become increasingly important and need to be mitigated as early in the design as possible. This paper proposes a power-aware methodology using dual supply voltages for soft error mitigation. The overall normalized design penalty per 1% soft error rate reduction is only 0.64%, 1.33X smaller than that of existing state-of-the-art approaches.