Design for Robust Microprocessors

Speaker: Professor Michail Maniatakos 

Host Faculty: Professor Ramesh Karri

Abstract

Ensuring quality, resilience, and trustworthiness of modern microprocessors is paramount to their ubiquitous deployment in contemporary applications. However, as microprocessors constitute the most complex integrated circuits, exhaustively analyzing their design and implementation in order to identify weaknesses that may jeopardize their robustness is infeasible. Toward devising realistically applicable solutions, this seminar explores the various trade-offs involved in developing and incorporating cost-effective robustness features. The ability to reason across layers, from transistors to architecture and from events to instructions, serves as the key to developing robustness enhancing solutions which extend beyond academic curiosity and become industrially relevant. Accordingly, effectiveness of the proposed methods will be demonstrated not only on academic microprocessor models, but also on commercial microprocessors (e.g., SUN SPARC, Intel Core).

About the Speakers

Michail Maniatakos is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi. He received a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University as well as the B.S. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Embedded Systems from the University of Piraeus, Greece, in 2006 and 2007, respectively. His research interests include modern microprocessor robustness, hardware security and computer architecture. He is the recipient of the 2011 IEEE TTTC Gerald W. Gordon Award, as well as the winner of the 2011 Embedded Systems Challenge of the NYU-Poly Cyber-Security Awareness Week (CSAW).