First paper as PhD student
Benny received this award for his first paper as a PhD student "Predator: a predictable SDRAM memory controller", which was written with co-authors Kees Goossens and Markus Ringhofer and published in CODES+ISSS 2007. Benny works as Endowed Professor one day per week in the  PCS group  since 2019.

The paper addressed the problem of providing guarantees on bandwidth and latency to ports on an SDRAM memory controller, a key component of a system-on-chip. Previously, this was only done for statically scheduled memory controllers that assumed the workload of memory requests was known a priori. While this limitation was acceptable for simple systems, increasing integration of functionality in consumer electronics products like set-top boxes challenged this assumption, requiring more dynamic solutions. To this end, the paper presented concepts, hardware architecture, and performance analysis for a more dynamic SDRAM memory controller for real-time systems.

Base for Research
This work formed the base for Benny's research, which evolved into a research line that would continue for over a decade and in which six PhD students eventually graduated. In total, this research line resulted in a body of work of 30+ papers and two books, which together have been cited more than 2000 times. It also resulted in the open-source tool DRAMPower, which is used to estimate energy consumption of memories. This tool has been integrated in the popular Gem5 simulator and is widely used by the computer architecture community.

Impactful
The paper was impactful because it was one of the first papers about memory controllers for real-time systems. More papers would follow from Barcelona Supercomputing Center, UC Berkley, and University of Waterloo. Step by step, the proposed memory controllers would become more dynamic and the analysis more sophisticated. This continued until the middle of the previous decade, at which the field moved more from proposing and analyzing new memory controller architectures for systems-on-chips to configuring and analyzing commercial-of-the-shelf memory controllers. This is still an active field of research in the real-time systems community today.

"Receiving this award is an unexpected honor, and I extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed to our paper and the subsequent advancements in this field. Together, we created, developed, and matured the research field of memory controllers for real-time systems."