Nathaniel Pinckney

Nathaniel Pinckney

Contact Information:

EECS
1301 Beal Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2122
[email protected]

Website and CV

Research Interest:

– Energy-efficient near-threshold computing 
– On-chip power supply boosting

Current Research:

– Near-threshold computing to maximize performance of heterogeneous workloads given a power constraint. Power consumption of a core can be reduced super linearly by lowering supply voltage while throughput can be maintained through parallelism. 

– Circuit and CAD techniques to enable near-threshold voltage operation. 

– Fast core boosting to efficiently adjust operating voltage to maximize energy efficiency. An intermediate power rail is used to raise the core supply voltage without disturbing other cores on a many-core processor. 

– Random number generation by using time-dependent oxide breakdown (OxiGen). Most prior true random number generator architectures rely on post-processing to remove bias in the generated stream. OxiGen repeatedly forces soft gate oxide dialectric breakdown under voltage stress and uses the time to breakdown to generate a random bit sequence, without requiring a post-processor.