CMOS sensors for on-line thermal monitoring of VLSI circuits
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Thermal Management System for High Performance PowerPCTM Microprocessors
COMPCON '97 Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE International Computer Conference
CMOS Differential and Absolute Thermal Sensors
IOLTW '01 Proceedings of the Seventh International On-Line Testing Workshop
Sensing temperature in CMOS circuits for Thermal Testing
VTS '04 Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE VLSI Test Symposium
A CMOS Thermal Sensor and Its Applications in Temperature Adaptive Design
ISQED '06 Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design
Systematic temperature sensor allocation and placement for microprocessors
Proceedings of the 43rd annual Design Automation Conference
Advanced thermal sensing circuit and test techniques used in a high performance 65nm processor
ISLPED '07 Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Accurate direct and indirect on-chip temperature sensing for efficient dynamic thermal management
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems - Special section on the ACM IEEE international conference on formal methods and models for codesign (MEMOCODE) 2009
A system level approach to multi-core thermal sensors calibration
PATMOS'11 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Integrated circuit and system design: power and timing modeling, optimization, and simulation
Recent thermal management techniques for microprocessors
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Collaborative calibration of on-chip thermal sensors using performance counters
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design
A failure prediction strategy for transistor aging
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
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Thermal management has emerged as an important design issue in a range of designs from portable devices to server systems. Internal thermal sensors are an integral part of such a management system. Process variations in CMOS circuits cause accuracy problems for thermal sensors which can be fixed by calibration tables. Stand-alone thermal sensors are calibrated to fix such problems. However, calibration requires going through temperature steps in a tester, increasing test application time and cost. Consequently, calibrating thermal sensors in typical digital designs including mainstream desktop and notebook processors increases the cost of the processor. This creates a need for design of thermal sensors whose accuracy does not vary significantly with process variations. Other qualities desired from thermal sensors include low area requirement so that many of them maybe integrated in a design as well as low power dissipation, such that the sensor itself does not become a significant source of heat. In this paper, we present a process variation tolerant thermal sensor design with (i) active compensation circuitry and (ii) signal dithering based self calibration technique to meet the above requirements in 32nm technology. Results show that we achieve ±3ºC temperature accuracy, with a relatively small design. This compares well with designs that are currently used.