WNTC 2012 Introduction

Near-threshold computing (NTC) has emerged as a promising approach to achieving an order of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency of microprocessors. The key feature of NTC is to lower the supply voltage of chips to a value only slightly higher than the threshold voltage. NTC lowers power consumption by an order of magnitude or more. The reduction in power however comes with associated costs and challenges that include low operating frequency, less reliable operation of both logic and memory and much higher sensitivity to parameter variability. Industry is actively investigating the technology and has produced prototypes that show promising initial results. However, many challenges remain before NTC becomes mainstream The Workshop on Near-threshold Computing held in conjunction with MICRO-45 explores software/architecture/circuit solutions for addressing performance, reliability or variability challenges in NTC. The workshop features three regular papers. In addition to the regular papers the workshop also features invited presentations from Prof. Josep Torrellas, University of Illinois, Prof. Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan, Dr. Ron Dreslinski, University of Michigan and Dr. Ram Krishnamurthy, Intel Corp.