University of Utah electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon was recently awarded, along with collaborator Prof. Shahar Kvatinsky from Technion, Ill., the 2016 Professor Amnon Pazy Memorial Research Award for his proposal on using non-volatile memories to create high-energy efficiency micro-controllers operated in an extremely wide voltage range.
The $10,000 Pazy Memorial Award was established in 2007 and given annually to the most outstanding and original new project in the mathematical sciences (mathematics and computer science). The award is presented by the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation.
“In the current context of the Internet of Things, the computing performance demand has to be adapted with the available energy supply resources,” Gaillardon said. “Many computing architectures have been proposed to provide significant computing power over a large range of supply voltage.”
But these solutions still rely on conventional volatile memory technologies, and they are not compatible anymore with the needs of deep Internet of Things. Using non-volatile memory for such systems can enable instant-on, normally-off operation with multi-context switch which can tremendously reduce the power trace of such a system.