A multidisciplinary research team from Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME) has won the IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology 2013 Best Paper Award. This honor was presented at the IEEE Electronic Components Technology Conference, held May 27-30, 2014 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

Chosen as the best publication in the Components: Characterization and Modeling category, the paper is entitled "Power Multiplexing for Thermal Field Management in Many-Core Processors." Coauthors are ECE Professors Saibal Mukhopadhyay and Sudhakar Yalamanchili; their graduated ECE Ph.D. students Minki Cho, Chad Kersey, and Nikhil Sathe; ME Assistant Professor Satish Kumar; and Man Prakash Gupta, Kumar's current ME Ph.D. student.

Power and thermal management have emerged as some of the most challenging problems facing today's computing industry. While it has become possible to design chips with many fast cores, the challenge is to be able to extract maximum performance without violating temperature constraints. Running the cores too hot slows down the processors, increases wasted energy, and decreases chip lifetime.

This team’s paper presented a simple, yet effective approach known as power multiplexing, which periodically migrates the locations of active cores on a chip to redistribute the generated heat. Such spatiotemporal redistribution of power and heat reduces the peak temperature and produces a more uniform thermal field, thus mitigating the negative impact of peak temperatures and thermal gradients on performance and reliability. 

Supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, Intel Corporation, and an IBM Faculty Award, this work reflects the multidisciplinary approach necessary to solving many critical problems facing the chip industry and demonstrates Georgia Tech’s longstanding commitment to collaborative research.

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Pictured in the photo from left to right are ME Assistant Professor Satish Kumar; ECE Associate Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay; Minki Cho, Mukhopadhyay's Ph.D. graduate, currently at Intel Labs, Hillsboro, Oregon; and Jie Xue, president of the IEEE Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology Society.