Runtime Self-Calibrated Temperature–Stress Cosensor for 3-D Integrated Circuits

On-chip temperature and stress sensors are important for runtime system management techniques tackling thermomechanical reliability issues in 3-D integrated circuits (ICs). However, traditional temperature and stress sensor designs require large calibration overhead to improve accuracy, which incurs significant cost for massive production. To address the challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel temperature-stress cosensor design for 3-D ICs. By exploring the inherent reciprocity of temperature and stress mechanisms, it achieves runtime self-calibration such that no dedicated calibration effort is needed. Simulation results show that the cosensor achieves 0.26°C and 0.43 MPa accuracy on average in temperature and stress measurements, respectively, when evaluated in [60 °C}, 140 ° C]. In addition, the accuracy of self-calibrated sensors remains within 1.1 °C and 2.3 MPa when there exists up to 5% measurement noise, which shows that the self-calibration process is relatively insensitive to various noises.