A power-driven thermal sensor placement algorithm for dynamic thermal management

On-chip physical thermal sensors play a vital role for accurately estimating the full-chip thermal profile. How to place physical sensors such that both the number of thermal sensors and the temperature estimation errors are minimized becomes important for on-chip dynamic thermal management of today´s high-performance microprocessors. In this paper, we present a new systematic thermal sensor placement algorithm. Different from the traditional thermal sensor placement algorithms where only the temperature information is explored, the new placement method takes advantage of functional unit power information by exploiting the correlation of power estimation errors among functional blocks. The new power-driven placement algorithm applies the correlation clustering algorithm to determine both the locations of sensors and the number of sensors automatically such that the temperature estimation errors can be minimized. Experimental results on a dual-core architecture show that the new thermal sensor placements yield more accurate full-chip temperature estimation compared to the uniform and the k-means based placement approaches.