Nam Sung Kim elected to MICRO Hall of Fame

Nam Sung Kim, CSL associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been inducted into the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Hall of Fame, an honor given to outstanding researchers who have consistently contributed to MICRO with high-impact research by ACM SIGMICRO, ACM’s Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture.

MICRO is the flagship conference for microprocessor architecture and one of three top conferences in the computer architecture community.

Kim’s research has focused on improving power efficiency of microprocessors, the most critical component of modern computers, including smartphones and data centers.

“This is a great honor because of the importance of this conference and the continual advancement of microprocessors,” said Kim. “We rely on this technology every day, so improving their energy efficiency will make life easier, and have significant impact on the environment and economy.”

One of his MICRO papers, titled “Razor: A Low-power Pipeline based on Circuit-Level Timing Speculation,” received the Best Paper Award in 2003 and has been cited more than 1,000 times.

Another MICRO paper, titled “Drowsy Instruction Caches: Leakage Power Reduction Using Dynamic Voltage Scaling and Cache Sub-Bank Prediction,” proposed an innovative concept to make on-chip memory very power-efficient without hurting the performance of computers. Variants of the concept have been applied to recent commercial microprocessors by the industry.

These two contributions have made a seminal impact to both the research community and the industry, and helped him to be elevated to an IEEE Fellow in his early 40s. Kim was also inducted into IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) in 2015.