IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)

IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)

Conference positioning

IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) is a top computer-science conference venue for microarchitecture, processors, accelerators, memory hierarchy, performance, and hardware/software interface. It rewards a microarchitecture paper with careful methodology, baselines, and workload characterization. Treat this skill as a fit / venue-selection / re-framing tool for conference submission strategy, not as a substitute for the current year's CFP, author kit, ethics policy, or submission portal.

Because CS conferences change deadlines, templates, page limits, review workflow, artifact rules, AI-use policy, and rebuttal formats every cycle, always verify the live official instructions before making a submission-ready recommendation. Start from the official source anchor recorded for this venue in ../../resources/conference-roster.md and ../../resources/official-source-map.md.

When to trigger

• The author names MICRO / IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture as the target venue.
• A manuscript in microarchitecture needs a conference-fit read before being formatted or submitted.
• The paper must be re-framed from journal style or arXiv style into a selective CS conference narrative.
• The author needs an evidence-gap, anonymity, artifact, rebuttal, or re-routing diagnosis for this venue.

Scope & topic fit

• Core fit: microarchitecture, processors, accelerators, memory hierarchy, performance, and hardware/software interface.
• Best submissions make a precise contribution type visible: algorithm, theorem, system, dataset, benchmark, empirical finding, design artifact, tool, or socio-technical analysis.
• The paper should explain why the result matters to MICRO's reviewers, not just why it is interesting to the authors' lab or product context.
• Position related work against the most recent conference-cycle papers in this venue and its closest siblings; stale comparisons are a common early-review weakness.
• If the contribution is interdisciplinary, state which part is CS research and which part is domain evidence.

Venue-specific calibration

• Reviewer lens: Treat MICRO as a microarchitecture flagship venue whose reviewers expect the scope and evidence to match its own community. Do not submit a generic CS paper until the introduction names the exact subcommunity, contribution type, and proof or empirical standard.
• Contribution hook to foreground: the venue-specific contribution bar.
• Scope vocabulary to use naturally in the abstract and introduction: microarchitecture, processors, accelerators, memory hierarchy, performance, and hardware/software interface.
• Distinctive fingerprint for reviewer calibration: microarchitecture, processors, accelerators, memory, hierarchy, performance, hardware, software, interface, venue-specific, contribution, flagship, microarch.
• Official anchor domain: www.microarch.org. Quote annual rules only after opening that source and the current-year CFP/author kit.

Close-neighbor routing guardrail

• Use this profile only when the manuscript's central contribution is genuinely in microarchitecture flagship and the author can say why MICRO reviewers are the primary audience, not merely a convenient deadline.
• Closest roster neighbors to compare before final routing: architectural-support-for- programming-languages-and-operating-systems (ASPLOS), international-symposium-on-computer- architecture (ISCA), ieee-international-symposium-on-high-performance-computer- architecture (HPCA), `international-conference-for-high-performance-computing-networking-