Xi Chen and Prof. Robert Dick receive DATE Best Paper Award

Ph.D. student Xi Chen, Prof. Robert Dick, and Prof. Li Shang (Chief Architect at Intel Labs, Beijing and Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder) will receive a Best Paper award at the 2011 Design Automation & Test in Europe Conference (DATE) for their paper, “Properties of and Improvements to Time-Domain Dynamic Thermal Analysis Algorithm,” which discusses fast thermal analysis for use in temperature-aware integrated circuit design.

The work was selected based on papers and presentations at the 2010 conference. A record number of papers, approximately 950, were submitted that year. DATE is the premier conference in Europe for Electronic System Design & Test. This year it will be held March 14-18, 2011 in Grenoble, France.

As stated in the paper, “Temperature has a strong influence on integrated circuit (IC) performance, power consumption, and reliability. However, accurate thermal analysis can impose high computation costs during the IC design process.” The authors analyzed performance and accuracy for a variety of dynamic thermal analysis techniques and used their findings to develop a new analysis technique that better adapts to the time-varying complexity of the models required for fast and accurate integrated circuit thermal simulation. Their thermal analysis software is available at the following
website: http://ziyang.eecs.umich.edu/projects/isac/.

Prof. Dick’s research focuses on embedded systems, computer-aided design, data compression, VLSI, power and thermal analysis and optimization, wireless sensor networks, hardware/software specification languages, and computer architecture.

Xi Chen is a doctoral student in computer science & engineering, concentrating in VLSI and computer architecture. His specialty is performance modeling, power modeling, and power management for high-performance computers.