Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department
University of Bologna, Italy

Design technologies for next-generation heterogeneous many-core platforms

Integrated computing platforms are rapidly evolving toward many-cores (hundreds to thousands), following the pace dictated by application requirements. Unfortunately, scaling toward many cores is not business as usual for design technology, as global timing, power, thermal convergence efforts are growing super-linearly with design complexity.

In this talk, I will review the main design technology challenges we faced during the design of STMicroelectronics next-generation Platform 2012 chip, in 28nm technology, featuring 64 dual-issue floating-point processors, several control processors and hardware accelerated blocks. I will give critical assessment of the key design automation bottlenecks and propose some direction for future development.

About the speaker:

Luca Benini is Full Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (DEIS) of the University of Bologna. He also holds a visiting faculty position at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and he is currently serving as Chief Architect for the Platform 2012 project in STmicroelectronics, Grenoble. He received a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1997.

Dr. Benini's research interests are in energy-efficient system design and Multi-Core SoC design. He is also active in the area of energy-efficient smart sensors and sensor networks for biomedical and ambient intelligence applications.

He has published more than 500 papers in peer-reviewed  international journals and conferences, four books and several book chapters. He has been general chair and program chair of the Design Automation and Test in Europe Conference. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the Academia Europaea, and a member of the steering board of the ARTEMISIA European Association on Advanced Research & Technology for Embedded Intelligence and Systems.