Research Areas

VLSI Systems conducts research in high-performance and power-efficient circuits, design automation tools, and technology characterizations and modeling. This work is conducted in collaboration with the SRDC technology development, EDA, ASICs, and P-series, Z-series, and games processor development partners.

The Tools and Technology Department focuses on the increasingly challenging issues related to the interactions between design and manufacturing. Design-for-manufacturing research includes improving the manufacturability of VLSI design through automation for technology characterization, structure generation, test code generation, data analysis, by improving model extraction, and model-to-hardware analysis and visualization. This department applies research computational capabilities to improve the quality and cost of technology development and delivery including hardware-based empirical performance evaluation, litho simulation, and predictive analysis tools for circuits in the 32nm and 22nm technology nodes.

The Exploratory VLSI Design Department develops high-performance, power-efficient VLSI circuits for application to IBM Servers, HPC systems, communications hardware, and ASICs including embedded-DRAM circuits, sensors and power-conversion circuits to enable system power management, and 3D integration capabilities.

The Design Productivity Department develops tools and methodologies to improve design we productivity across the entire IBM design space including physical synthesis tools research within the Advanced SoC Design Methodology, developing high-level design tools and languages for improved logic-design proactivity, and application of these tools to key Research projects like Bluegene/Q design.

Future Systems focuses on software system issues, including system-level power analysis, system performance and low-level system software issues. It consists of 3 departments: Performance and Tools, Power-Aware Systems and System Software.

Power-Aware Systems develops effective policies and mechanisms for energy management in today's computers, as power has become a principal design constraint in processors, memories and storage systems. We also operate a power-measurement lab employing custom systems we have designed.

Performance and Tools develops and uses simulation and performance tools to evaluate future systems. Our simulation tools are used within IBM and by IBM's partners for early software development and to allow for more complete evaluation of future system designs. Members of our team are also involved in the evaluation and design of these systems throughout the hardware and software stack.

Novel Systems Architecture activities cover low-level system software issues, including operating systems, hardware-software integration, middleware, clustering, distributed systems, system management, and security.