William Song won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2015 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS), held April 21-23 in Monterey, California. IRPS is the preeminent conference for timely research on reliability physics of devices, materials, circuits, and products used in the electronics industry. The award is based on post-conference feedback from attendees.

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Song was awarded this distinction for his paper, “Managing Performance-Reliability Tradeoffs in Multicore Processors”, co-authored with ECE Professors Sudhakar Yalamanchili (who is Song’s Ph.D. advisor) and Saibal Mukhopadhyay. 

A fundamental trade-off exists between processor performance and lifetime reliability, and high throughput operations increase power and heat dissipation, which have an adverse impact on lifetime reliability. In contrast, lifetime reliability favors low utilization to reduce stresses and avoid failures.

A key challenge in understanding this tradeoff is in connecting application characteristics to device-level degradation behaviors. Using a full-system microarchitecture and physics simulation framework, the research team analyzed the performance-reliability tradeoff in a multicore processor by introducing a new metric, throughput-lifetime product (TLP). The team’s research findings produced new techniques to effectively manage tradeoffs between lifetime reliability and performance. 

Song's work was supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) through an SRC Graduate Fellowship.