Towards Real-Time Monitoring of Thermal Peaks in Systems-on-Chip (SoC)

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 22; no. 15; p. 5904
• Main Authors: Oukaira, Aziz, Hassan, Ahmad, Ali, Mohamed, Savaria, Yvon, Lakhssassi, Ahmed
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 07.08.2022; MDPI
• Subjects: Accuracy; Cameras; Circuit design; Field programmable gate arrays; Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA); Gradient Direction Sensor (GDS); Heat; Integrated circuits; Integrated Circuits (ICs); Monitoring; Performance evaluation; Real time; Sensors; System on chip; System on Chip (SoC); Temperature; thermal camera; Thermal mapping; thermal monitoring
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s22155904

This paper presents a method to monitor the thermal peaks that are major concerns when designing Integrated Circuits (ICs) in various advanced technologies. The method aims at detecting the thermal peak in Systems on Chip (SoC) using arrays of oscillators distributed over the area of the chip. Measured frequencies are mapped to local temperatures that are used to produce a chip thermal mapping. Then, an indication of the local temperature of a single heat source is obtained in real-time using the Gradient Direction Sensor (GDS) technique. The proposed technique does not require external sensors, and it provides a real-time monitoring of thermal peaks. This work is performed with Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which acts as a System-on-Chip, and the detected heat source is validated with a thermal camera. A maximum error of 0.3 °C is reported between thermal camera and FPGA measurements.