MICRO 2021

Paper Evaluation Objectives

The committee will make every effort to judge each submitted paper on its own merits. There will be no target acceptance rate. We expect to accept a wide range of papers with appropriate expectations for evaluation – while papers that build on significant past work with strong evaluations are valuable, papers that open new areas with less rigorous evaluation are equally welcome and especially encouraged.

Field	Value
Page Limit	11 pages, not including references
Paper Size	US Letter: 8.5in x 11in
Top/Bottom Margins	1in
Left/Right Margins	0.75in
Body	2-column, single spaced
Space Between Columns	0.25in
Line Spacing (Leading)	11pt
Body Font	10pt, Times
Abstract Font	10pt, Times
Section Heading Font	12pt, bold
Subsection Heading Font	10pt, bold
Caption Font	9pt (minimum), bold
References	8pt, no page limit, list all authors' names

Content

Reviewing will be double blind: please do not include any author names on any submitted documents except in the space provided on the submission form. You must also ensure that the metadata included in the PDF does not give away the authors. If you are improving upon your prior work, refer to your prior work in the third person and include a full citation for the work in the bibliography. For example, if you are building on your own prior work in the papers, you would say something like: “While the authors of [x][y] did X, Y, and Z, this paper additionally does W, and is therefore much better.” Do NOT omit or anonymize references for blind review. There is one exception to this for your own prior work that appeared in IEEE CAL, arXiv, workshops without archived proceedings, etc., as discussed later in this document.

Figures and Tables

Ensure that the figures and tables are legible. Please also ensure that you refer to your figures in the main text. Many reviewers print the papers in gray-scale. Therefore, if you use colors for your figures, ensure that the different colors are highly distinguishable in grayscale.

References

There is no length limit for references. Each reference must explicitly list all authors of the paper. Papers not meeting this requirement will be rejected. Authors of NSF proposals should be familiar with this requirement. Knowing all authors of related work will help find the best reviewers. Since there is no length limit for the number of pages used for references, there is no need to save space here.

Paper Submission Instructions

Guidelines for Determining Authorship

ACM and IEEE guidelines dictate that authorship should be based on a substantial intellectual contribution. It is assumed that all authors have had a significant role in the creation of an article that bears their names. In particular, the authorship credit must be reserved only for individuals who have met each of the following conditions:

1. Made a significant intellectual contribution to the theoretical development, system or experimental design, prototype development, and/or the analysis and interpretation of data associated with the work contained in the article;
2. Contributed to drafting the article or reviewing and/or revising it for intellectual content; and
3. Approved the final version of the article as accepted for publication, including references.

For more information, please read the detailed descriptions of the ACM Criteria for Authorship and the IEEE Publication Principles, covering authorship guidelines and responsibilities. Per these guidelines, it is not acceptable to award honorary authorship or gift authorship. Please keep these guidelines in mind while determining the author list of your paper.

Declaring Authors

Declare all the authors of the paper upfront. Addition/removal of authors once the paper is accepted will have to be approved by the program chairs, since it potentially undermines the goal of eliminating conflicts for reviewer assignment.

Areas and Topics

Authors should indicate these areas on the submission form as well as specific topics covered by the paper for optimal reviewer match. If you are unsure whether your paper falls within the scope of MICRO, please check with the program chairs – MICRO is a broad, multidisciplinary conference and encourages new topics.

Revision of Previously-Reviewed Manuscript

If the manuscript has been previously reviewed and rejected and is now being submitted to MICRO, the authors are expected to provide a letter explaining how the paper has been revised for this current submission. We expect this revision information to both improve submissions and the review process. Note that it is not a requirement that papers be revised before being submitted to MICRO, but we expect a revision letter nonetheless, even if it states that the paper has not been revised.

We encourage you to keep this letter concise and append additional information, such as a version of the paper that highlights the differences or any other material of your choice. While this letter is required for submission (with a deadline that will be one week after the paper submission deadline), the authors have control about who and when this letter will be shared with, by specifying one of the following options:

1. Shared with all reviewers during the initial review process
2. Shared with reviewers who declare that they reviewed a prior version and explicitly request the revision information
3. Shared along with the rebuttal
4. Shared only with paper discussion leads in preparation for PC discussion
5. Not shared with any PC member

If the authors select Option 5, meaning they do not wish to share this information, a minimalistic letter can be uploaded. For more information, please refer to the FAQ.

After the paper deadline, you will not be able to upload your revision letter through HotCRP. Instead, please use one of the following links to submit your revision letter:

• RevisionLetterRestricted: This will be used for all sharing options except for sharing immediately with all reviewers. To use this option, upload your revision letter (as a single PDF named micro2021-paper###-revision-letter.pdf) at this link.
• RevisionLetterVisibleAll: Upload your revision letter and all additional information as a single PDF here ONLY if you wish to share this information with all reviewers right after the review assignment. To use this option, upload your revision letter (as a single PDF named micro2021-paper###-revision-letter.pdf) at this link.

Declaring Conflicts of Interest

Authors must register all their conflicts for their paper submission. Conflicts are needed to ensure appropriate assignment of reviewers. If a paper is found to have an undeclared conflict that causes a problem OR if a paper is found to declare false conflicts in order to abuse or "game" the review system, the paper may be rejected without review. We use the following conflict of interest guidelines for determining the conflict period for MICRO 2021. Please declare a conflict of interest (COI) with the following people for any author of your paper:

1. Your Ph.D. advisor(s), post-doctoral advisor(s), Ph.D. students, and post-doctoral advisees, forever.
2. Family relations by blood or marriage, or their equivalent, forever (if they might be potential reviewers).
3. People with whom you have collaborated in the last FOUR years, including co-authors of accepted/rejected/pending papers, co-PIs on accepted/rejected/pending grant proposals, funders (decision makers) of your research grants, and researchers whom you fund.
4. People (including students) who shared your primary institution(s) in the last FOUR years.
5. Ongoing collaboration that has not yet resulted in a paper or proposal submission. Justification may be queried.
6. Other relationships, such as close personal friendship or close mentors, that you think might tend to affect your judgment or be seen as doing so by a reasonable person familiar with the relationship.

We would also like to emphasize that the following scenarios do not constitute a conflict:

1. Authors of previously-published, closely related work on that basis alone.
2. "Service" collaborations such as co-authoring a report for a professional organization, serving on a program committee, or co-presenting tutorials.
3. Co-authoring a paper that is a compendium of various projects, community-wide tools (e.g., gem5), non-research articles, or working groups (e.g., RISC-V), with no true collaboration among the projects.
4. People who work on topics similar to or related to those in your papers.
5. People under the same umbrella funding award where there is no close collaboration, no discussion of unpublished work, and no joint benefit in the paper being published.

We hope to draw most reviewers from the program committee, but others from the community may also write reviews. Please declare all your conflicts in text format. When in doubt, please contact the program chairs.

Please note that all paper submissions require all authors to electronically sign a statement confirming their best effort to accurately identify potential reviewers with a conflict of interest, and importantly also assuring that each author will make no explicit attempt to directly or indirectly influence any reviewer opinion or decision about the submitted paper. Importantly, we do not consider technical discussion of a paper's content or any other sharing of content from the paper to violate the above policy.

Concurrent Submissions and Workshops

By submitting a manuscript to MICRO 2021, the authors guarantee that the manuscript has not been previously published or accepted for publication in a substantially similar form in any conference, journal, or the archived proceedings of a workshop (e.g., in the ACM/IEEE digital library) – see exceptions below. The authors also guarantee that no paper that contains significant overlap with the contributions of the submitted paper will be under review for any other conference or journal or an archived proceedings of a workshop during the MICRO 2021 review period. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to rejection.

The only exceptions to the above rules are for the authors' own papers in (1) workshops without archived proceedings such as in the ACM/IEEE digital library (or where the authors chose not to have their paper appear in the archived proceedings), or (2) venues such as IEEE CAL or arXiv where there is an explicit policy that such publication does not preclude longer conference submissions. In all such cases, the submitted manuscript may ignore the above work to preserve author anonymity. This information must, however, be provided on the submission form – the program chairs will make this information available to reviewers if it becomes necessary to ensure a fair review. As always, if you are in doubt, it is best to contact the program chairs.

Finally, the ACM Plagiarism Policy and the IEEE Plagiarism Policy cover a range of ethical issues concerning the misrepresentation of other works or one's own work.

Acknowledgments

This document is derived from previous conferences, in particular MICRO 2013, ASPLOS 2015, MICRO 2015, MICRO 2016, MICRO 2017, MICRO 2018, MICRO 2019, and MICRO 2020.