CISE Ph.D. student Yuanwen Huang and his advisor Prabhat Mishra won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED 2016) for their paper entitled “Reliability and Energy-aware Cache Reconfiguration for Embedded Systems.”

This paper has developed optimization techniques to balance conflicting design constraints such as energy and reliability. Cache vulnerability due to soft errors is one of the reliability concerns in embedded systems. Dynamic reconfiguration techniques are widely studied for improving cache energy without considering the implications of cache vulnerability. Maintaining a useful data longer in the cache can be beneficial for energy improvement due to a reduction in miss rates,  however,  longer data retention negatively impacts the vulnerability due to soft errors. This paper studies the trade-off between energy efficiency improvement and reduction in cache vulnerability during cache reconfiguration.

Embedded Systems Lab conducts cutting-edge research on a broad range of topics related to energy-aware computing, system-level validation, hardware security and trust, and post-silicon debug. Specifically, we develop efficient optimization algorithms for improving overall energy, security and reliability of embedded systems. You can visit the lab for related research efforts and publications.