Tohru Ishihara
Kyoto University, Japan
Minimum Energy Point Tracking Exploiting All-Digital On-Chip Sensors
Abstract
Scaling the supply voltage (VDD) and threshold voltage (VTH) simultaneously for minimizing the energy consumption of processors dynamically is highly desired for applications such as wireless sensor network and Internet of Things (IoT). In this talk, we refer to a pair of VDD and VTH, which minimizes the energy consumption of the processor for a given operating condition, as a minimum energy point (MEP in short). Since the MEP is heavily dependent on operating conditions such as an activity factor, temperature, and a performance required for the processor, it is not trivial to closely track the MEP at run-time. This talk presents a method of autonomously tracking the MEP over a wide range of the operating condition exploiting all-digital on-chip sensors. A microprocessor chip designed with a 65 nm CMOS technology, which integrates multiple sensors on the same die demonstrates that our method closely tracks the MEP over a wide range of the operating condition.
Biography
Tohru Ishihara received his Dr.Eng. degree in computer science from Kyushu University in 2000. For the next three years, he was a Research Associate in the VLSI Design and Education Center, the University of Tokyo. From 2003 to 2005, he was with Fujitsu Laboratories of America as a Research Staff of an Advanced CAD Technology Group. From 2005 to 2011, he was with Kyushu University as an Associate Professor. In April 2011 he joined Kyoto University, where he is currently with the Dept. of Communications and Computer Engineering. His research interests include low-power design methodologies and power management techniques for embedded systems. Dr. Ishihara is a member of the IEEE, ACM, IPSJ and IEICE. He has served on program committee of numerous conferences such as CODES+ISSS, ISLPED and so on.