VISA @ MICRO 2026

1st Workshop on Virtual ISA for Rapidly Evolving Architectures (VISA 2026)
Co-located with MICRO 2026
October 31, 2026
Athens, Greece
https://visaworkshop.github.io/2026/

VISA 2026 examines the virtual ISA — a stable, hardware-agnostic abstraction between high-level programming models and diverse hardware backends — as the pivotal interface of the agentic era: the contract surface where LLM-driven code synthesizers, autonomous autotuners, compilers, and microarchitectural innovation meet. When the programmer is a machine, the ISA must be self-describing enough to reason over and verifiable enough to trust.
The accelerator landscape is undergoing rapid and continuous transformation. However, this rapid architectural evolution introduces a critical fragmentation problem: each accelerator spawns its own toolchain, compiler backend, and software stack, leading to duplicated engineering effort, poor portability, and steep developer learning curves across targets. Virtual ISA enables compiler reuse across heterogeneous targets, rapid hardware prototyping, software longevity across architectural generations, and composable optimization at the right abstraction level.
Despite this progress, the community lacks a dedicated venue for the cross-cutting challenges of Virtual ISA design, compilation, DSL integration, and co-design — the gap this workshop aims to fill.

We invite short papers (4–6 pages, IEEE format) describing work in progress, position papers, vision papers, or early results. The scope spans the full accelerator stack — ISA design and semantics, compilation and optimization, DSLs and programming models, hardware co-design, and deployment experience.

The agent-facing interface is the flagship theme that runs through all of them: wherever your work sits, we encourage you to ask how the problem changes when the primary reader and writer of the ISA is a machine.

Topics of Interest : https://visaworkshop.github.io/2026/cfp.html

• Agent-Facing Virtual ISA Interfaces
• Virtual ISA Design and Abstraction
• Virtual ISA and Architecture Co-design
• Compiler Optimizations
• DSLs and Programming Models
• Case Studies and Infrastructure

Submission guidelines
Paper length: 4–6 pages using the IEEE conference two-column template.
Paper types: Work-in-progress papers, position papers, vision papers, and early-results papers are welcome.
Reviewing: The review process is single-blind. Author names and affiliations should appear in the submission.
Review process: Every submission will receive at least three reviews. Papers will be evaluated for relevance, originality, soundness, and potential to spark discussion.
Publication: Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and posted on the VISA 2026 website. The workshop is non-archival, and submission does not preclude later publication at another venue.
Presentation: At least one author of every accepted paper must register for the workshop through MICRO 2026 and present the work.

Submission site: https://visa2026.hotcrp.com/

Important Dates

Paper submission  deadline: September 25, 2026, 23:59 AoE
Author notification: October 9, 2026, 23:59 AoE
Camera-ready papers: October 16, 2026, 23:59 AoE

Contact: visa.workshop.chairs@gmail.com