CoRAM and Beyond: Towards Logic Specialization for the Masses

Eric Chung

Microsoft Research Silicon Valley

Abstract

We stand at the brink of a major disruption in the semiconductor industry. Although transistors continue to scale, our failure to commensurately reduce the supply voltage (and power) will inherently limit the scalability of future multi-core architectures. To unleash new capabilities in next-generation servers and devices, hardware specialization in the form of ASICs and FPGAs offers significant potential in enhancing processor efficiency by an order of magnitude or more. As a first step towards making specialization viable for the “masses”, this talk will present CoRAM, a joint effort with CMU to develop and prototype a scalable, portable, and programmable memory abstraction for future FPGAs.  I will also discuss ongoing research efforts such as the LINQits project, a first step towards bridging the gulf between rich software ecosystems and low-level programmable logic.

Biography

Eric Chung is currently a post-doc at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley and received his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011. He is broadly interested in architecting hardware specialization for future computer architectures and software systems.  In a collaboration with CMU, he leads the CoRAM project, an endeavor to build scalable portable FPGA architectures. He was also the lead developer of ProtoFlex, an architecture for emulating full-system, large-scale multiprocessors using FPGAs.