MICRO 2025

Format Highlights

• Papers must be submitted in printable PDF format.
• Text must be in a minimum 9pt font (see Paper Formatting Section for details)
• Papers must be at most 11 pages, not including references.
• No Appendix is allowed.
• No page limit for references.
• Each reference must specify all authors (no et al.).
• Author anonymity must be fully preserved, including any referenced artifacts (e.g., GitHub repository).

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	9pt, Times
Abstract Font	9pt, Times
Section Heading Font	12pt
Subsection Heading Font	10pt
Caption Font	9pt (minimum)
References	8pt, no page limit, list all authors' names

Content

Reviewing will be double blind (no author list); therefore, 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. You must fully anonymize any links to artifacts (e.g., GitHub repository) and remove any links to artifacts that cannot be fully anonymized. Do not include any acknowledgments (e.g. to persons, funding agencies, etc.). Papers that violate the anonymization policy may be rejected without review.

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 [x][y][z], you would say something like: ”While the authors of [x][y][z] 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 gray-scale.

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. 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 reviewed and/or revised it for intellectual content; and
3. Approved the final version of the article as accepted for publication, including references.

For more information, please refer to 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 or gift authorships. 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.

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 2025. 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 members, forever (if they might be potential reviewers).
3. People who have collaborated in the last FOUR years. This collaboration can consist of a joint research or development project, a joint paper, or a pending or awarded joint proposal. Co-participation in professional education (e.g., workshops/tutorials), service (e.g., program committees), and other non-research-focused activities does not generally constitute a conflict. When in doubt, the author(s) should check with the program chairs.
4. People who were at the same institution in the last FOUR years, or where one is actively engaged in discussions about employment with the other person’s institution. Note: Graduate students are not presumed to have an automatic COI with their undergraduate institution. Similarly, students who have finalized internships at companies are not presumed to retain an automatic COI with that company. On the other hand, prospective graduate students do have a COI with any institution they have applied to if they are actively engaged in discussions with any faculty member at that institution. Once they join an institution to pursue graduate studies, automatic COIs with any other prospective institutions sunset. In all these cases, the collaboration COI above still applies.
5. Among the leadership of research structures supported by an umbrella funding award (i.e., people making funding decisions or representing members’ work before the funding agency) and other members under that umbrella award.
6. Among PIs of research structures supported under the same umbrella funding award who 1) participate regularly in non-public meetings sponsored by that umbrella award, and 2) are regularly exposed to presentations or discussions of unpublished work at such meetings.
7. People whose relationship prevents the reviewer from being objective in his/her assessment.

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 (not just restricted to the PC). When in doubt, please contact the program chairs.

Submission Policy for Program Chairs and Organizing Committee Members

The Program Chair(s) are responsible for the paper selection process and do not submit papers to avoid potential bias. Program Committee members and the Organizing Committee, including the General Chair(s), are allowed to submit papers because of double-blind reviewing and conflict-of-interest declaration and enforcement. The rationale for explicitly allowing General Chair(s) to submit is that they do not participate in the paper selection process, nor are they involved in the Program Chair and Program Committee selection process. See here for the updated bylaws approved by the MICRO Steering Committee.

Concurrent Submissions and Workshops

By submitting a manuscript to MICRO 2025, 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 2025 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.

Author's Responsibilities and Best Practices

Authors are expected to abide by the ACM Plagiarism Policy and the IEEE Plagiarism Policy that cover a range of ethical issues concerning the misrepresentation of other works or one’s own work. Authors are also expected to abide by the “authors best practices” specific to architecture conferences outlined in the SIGARCH/TCCA Best Practices for Conference Reviewing document.

Ethics

Authors must abide by the ACM Code of Ethics and the IEEE Code of Ethics.

Authors must not contact reviewers or PC members about any submission, including their own. This includes attempting to sway a reviewer, requesting information about any aspect of the reviewing process, and/or asking about the outcome of a submission. Similarly, authors are not allowed to ask another party to contact the reviewers on their behalf.

Authors must not disclose the content of reviews for their paper publicly (e.g., on social media) before the results are announced.

Authors must report any allegations of submission or reviewing misconduct to the program chairs. The only exception is if the complaint is about the program chairs; in this case, the Steering Committee should be contacted.

Reviewers and Authors are expected to communicate in a professional manner in their reviews, comments and rebuttals. Abusive, threatening or inappropriate language will not be tolerated and can be grounds for dismissing reviewers and rejecting papers, as well as reporting to ACM and IEEE.

Acknowledgments

This document is derived from previous conferences, in particular MICRO 2013, ASPLOS 2015, MICRO 2015-2024, ISCA 2025, as well as SIGARCH/TCCA’s Recommended Best Practices for the Conference Reviewing Process.