CSE spinoff wins the Linley Group’s Analysts’ Choice Award

Cyclos Semiconductor, the resonant clock-mesh technology firm co-founded by CSE Chair Marios Papaefthymiou, has received The Linley Group’s Analysts’ Choice Award for Best Processor Technology of 2012. The Linley Group publishes Microprocessor Report, a highly regarded weekly research and analysis publication on the semiconductor industry.

Cyclos was selected for the award “for its achievements in replacing conventional clock-signal trees with a resonant clock mesh and easing the design of high-performance chips.”

Designers of high-performance semiconductors can reduce the power consumption of their designs by 10%, 20%, or even 30% with the use of Cyclos’ resonant clock mesh technology, which introduces inductive-capacitive oscillators in mesh-based high-performance clock distribution networks to provide frequency-locked, high-performance, high-precision timing with very low power consumption. In addition to ultra-low power, the Cyclos technology yields clock networks with increased robustness to process and environmental variations in current and upcoming nanometer technologies.

Cyclos has developed a resonant clock mesh packaged as licensable intellectual property (IP). It uses much less power than a traditional clock tree and is already winning converts. Notably, AMD used Cyclos technology to design its next-generation Piledriver CPU core, currently shipping in laptops, and the technology is currently being designed into next-generation ARM Cortex-A15 processors in partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Two undisclosed companies have licensed the technology for future chips based on the ARM Cortex-A15.

Prof. Marios Papaefthymiou is the Chair of Computer Science and Engineering at the U-M, and in 2005 co-founded Cyclos Semiconductor, where he is President and Chief Scientist. His research addresses a broad spectrum of problems in computer design with an emphasis on architectures and design methodologies for energy-efficient high-performance computers. He is also active in the field of parallel and distributed computing.

Prof. Papaefthymiou obtained his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1990 and 1993 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among other distinctions, Prof. Papaefthymiou has received faculty recognition awards from Yale College, the EECS Department and Graduate School at U-M, a Young Investigator Award from ARO, CAREER and ITR Awards from NSF, and several IBM Partnership Awards.