The title of Dr. Lee's award-winning project is "Architectural Exploration for Emerging Memory Technologies." This work will investigate the impact of emerging “storage class memories” (SCM) to the logic design, memory architecture, overall platform design, and their applications for future multi-core computing systems. Dr. Lee and his team will focus on phase-change memory (PCM), spin-torque-transfer memory (STT-RAM), and memristors. These memories demonstrate better characteristics in density, scalability, power, process compatibility, and non-volatility than current commodity memory technologies such as SRAM and DRAM and will eventually become part of the memory hierarchy of a computing system, including the last-level cache (to substitute SRAM), main memory (to co-locate with DRAM), and storage (to replace magnetic drives). The goal of this project is to exploit and quantify the benefits and to also address the reliability challenges of these novel memory technologies with architectural level solutions.

Dr. Lee is one of two faculty members from Georgia Tech to receive a 2011 IBM Faculty Award. Ling Liu, a professor in the School of Computer Science within the College of Computing, also received this honor.