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SUMMARY:A Decade of Building Broken Chips
DTSTART:20130618T100000
DTEND:20130618T110000
DTSTAMP:20260603T162023Z
UID:21551c210daa5a01024d2b82a30512552e4f587f0feea3b1a22b35f1
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Krishna V. Palem\, Rice University\nWell over a decade a
 go\, many believed that an engine of growth driving the semiconductor and 
 computing industries\, captured nicely by Gordon Moore’s remarkable prop
 hecy (Moore’s law)\,  was speeding towards a dangerous cliff-edge. Rang
 ing from expression of concern to doomsday scenarios\, the exact time when
  serious hurdles would beset us varied quite a bit—some of the more opti
 mistic warnings giving Moore’s law till 2020! Needless to say\, a lot of
  people have spent time and effort with great success to find ways for sub
 stantially extending the time when we would encounter the dreaded cliff-ed
 ge\, if not avoid it altogether. When faced with this issue\, I decided to
  consider a different approach—one which suggested falling off the metap
 horical cliff as a design choice\, but in a controlled manner. This would 
 result in devices that could switch and produce bits that are correct\, na
 mely have the intended value\, only with a probabilistic guarantee. As a r
 esult\, the results could in fact be incorrect. Such devices and associate
 d circuits and computing structures are now broadly referred to as inexact
  designs\, circuits and architectures. In this talk\, I will start with th
 e beginnings of this idea in 2002—one that Technology Review labeled as 
 being heretical in their TR10 citation—and give an overview of a range o
 f ideas that my students and other groups around the world have been devel
 oping since\,  that embody  inexact computing today. Despite being proba
 bilistic\,  inexact designs can be significantly more efficient in the en
 ergy they consume\, their speed of execution and area needs\, which makes 
 them attractive for resilient applications which can tolerate error. I wil
 l also contrast this style of design with traditional approaches with a ri
 ch history\, aimed at realizing reliable computing from unreliable element
 s\, starting with von Neumann’s influential lectures and further develop
 ed elegantly by Shannon-Weaver and others.
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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