Digital integrated temperature sensors for VLSI thermal management

VLSI thermal management system requires integrated temperature sensors to monitor on-chip hot spots. This paper reviews delay-line based integrated digital temperature sensors. More importantly, various calibration techniques for the delay-line based temperature sensor will also be discussed. In particular, an all-digital self-calibrated temperature sensor implemented entirely on an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA will be introduced. This work is further demonstrated on an emulated multi-core system to obtain the runtime thermal profiles of four different cores to facilitate the implementation of different VLSI thermal management schemes.