The field of microelectronics has had a profound impact on both the scientific world and on our personal lives. Through astonishing advances in performance, microprocessors have replaced traditional mainframes and supercomputers with microprocessor-based workstations and servers. The remarkable decrease in cost vs. performance for microprocessors has made computing ubiquitous, putting web-conne...

This paper discusses the use of MEMS-type devices for the cooling of microprocessors. Vapor compression refrigerators and circulated-coolant heat-exchange systems are analyzed. Water and commercial refrigerants are considered as working fluids. Calculations indicate that although vapor compression systems are capable of removing greater amounts of heat, circulated-coolant systems are far more p...

Device scaling has caused the challenges that processor designers face to evolve significantly in the past. This trend will continue into the future, and reliability is emerging as a significant challenge. In this work, we focus on one aspect of the reliability problem: soft errors. In particular, cost effective mitigation of soft errors in processor microarchitecture. Our investigation begins ...

Introduction Recent advances in VLSI technology have made it possible to use large enough caches to eliminate most of the \conventional" cache misses resulting from limited cache size and/or set associativity. As a result, other \non-conventional" cache misses that used to be obscured by the more frequent conventional cache misses are becoming increasingly dominant in the makeup of the total ca...

In this paper we investigate possible ways to improve the energy efficiency of a general purpose microprocessor. We show that the energy of a processor depends on its performance, so we chose the energy-delay product to compare different processors. To improve the energy-delay product we explore methods of reducing energy consumption that do not lead to performance loss (i.e., wasted energy), a...

This paper reports recent work on the automatic design and implementation of microprocessors to suit particular applications. We use our own hardware compilation system to produce synchronous hardware implementations of parallel programs and have constructed platforms incorporating Field Programmable Gate Array and transputer components to host such implementations. Our chosen language, Handel,...

This paper proposes a new thermal nonlinear modeling technique for packaged integrated systems. Thermal behavior of complicated systems like packaged electronic systems may exhibit nonlinear and temperature dependent properties. As a result, it is difficult to use a low order linear model to approximate the thermal behavior of the packaged integrated systems without accuracy loss. In this paper...

A compact, two-stage R-404A / R-508b cascade refrigeration system designed for interface with a high-performance microprocessor is under development. Such a system, designed to remove 100 W at –70 °C, can avoid the high cost of deep cryogenic cooling. Because thermal interface design is critical in maintaining low chip temperatures, a compact, microchannel evaporator is used. A chemically micro...

The microprocessor-a computer central processing unit integrated onto a single microchip-has come to dominate computing across all of its scales from the tiniest consumer appliance to the largest supercomputer. This dominance has taken decades to achieve, but an irresistible logic made the ultimate outcome inevitable. The objectives of this Perspective paper are to offer a brief history of the ...

Title of dissertation: HARNESSING CHECKER HIERARCHY FOR RELIABLE MICROPROCESSORS Joonhyuk Yoo Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Professor Manoj Franklin Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Microprocessors are becoming increasingly susceptible to soft errors due to the current trends of semiconductor technology scaling. Traditional fault-tolerant multi-threading ...