Distributed Temperature Sensor Network For Sensing Of Multicore Systems

During development of large-scale integrated circuits, the increment rate of integrated circuit density has been thirty percent annually with the reducing of feature size at the same rate. In the times of SoC, millions and billions of transistors are integrated in one single chip, which makes the power consumption per unit area increased significantly. The improvement of device performance is greatly limited due to the rapidly rising inner temperature of chips. In order to ensure the chip is working in a reasonable range of temperature and avoid unpredictable fault, a precise and effective thermal monitoring system is proposed.In this paper, a distributed temperature sensor network for sensing and monitoring of multicore system based on pulse-width modulation (PWM) output of a voltage-to-pulse generator (VPG) with the consideration of reusing the pulse width counter instead of ADC is proposed. Temperature-dependent voltages are generated by a temperature sensor (TS).Temperature-dependent voltages are translated by voltage-to-pulse generators into pulses with width proportional to temperature. A pulse width counter instead of analogy-to-digital convertor is reused for recording the width of pulse translated through bus. We propose a strategy for interconnection of temperature sensors which takes into consideration of reusing pulse width counter. The proposed temperature sensor has errors of -0.65~0.72℃over the range of 0~100℃implement in SMIC 0.18um technology. The power consumption is 98.6uw at a sampling rate of 200Hz. This system is realized by verilog HDL and tested in modelsim and eldo supplied by ADMS simulation platform. Finally, SoC695 is test in this system, and errors are proved in the predicting rang.