Ron Dreslinski Selected for IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award

Research Scientist Dr. Ron Dreslinski has been selected to receive the Young Computer Architect Award from the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA). The award recognizes outstanding research contributions by an individual in the field of Computer Architecture and is open to any individual who has completed his/her PhD degree within last 6 years. The winner of the award will be someone who has made an outstanding, innovative research contribution or contributions to Computer Architecture.

Dr. Dreslinski conducts research in the area of energy efficient processor architectures, a subject that has evolved from his dissertation work at Michigan entitled, “Near Threshold Computing: From Single Core to Many-Core Energy Efficient Architectures,” which takes the position that approaches to the impending end of Moore’s Law, brought on by the energy dissipation limitations of CMOS, must come from enhanced devices, design styles, and architectures, rather than a reliance on the emergence of radically new technologies. He is investigating the universal application of aggressive low voltage operation across all computation platforms through an approach called “near-threshold computing” (NTC) and novel methods to overcome the barriers that have historically relegated ultra-low voltage operation to niche markets. As a proof of concept, Dr. Dreslinski has designed a 3D integrated multicore prototype with 128 ARM Cortex-M3 cores and 256MB of DRAM that operates at near-threshold levels, but that can also boost selected cores when single thread performance is needed. The prototype was received from the foundry, tested, and passed all tests, and it demonstrates over a 6x improvement in energy efficiency over conventional processors.

Dr. Dreslinski was recognized by the College of Engineering with the Kenneth M. Reese Outstanding Research Scientist Award in 2015.