Exploration of ring oscillator based temperature sensors network accuracy on FPGA

Abstract

During the last decades, technology scaling in reconfigurable logic devices enabled implementing complicated designs which results in higher power density and on-chip temperature. Since higher operating temperature of chips is a critical problem in electronics devices, thermal management techniques are highly required. To provide a thermal map of reconfigurable logic devices, a network of sensors is needed. In this work, a ring-oscillator-based temperature sensor is used to create a sensor network. Then, a design space exploration is done among several sensor networks with the various sensor configurations including different ring oscillator length, the number of sensors in the examined network and various sampling time. We propose three criteria for exploring and comparing the efficiency of sensors network based on the thermal overhead and also measurement accuracy and precision among plenty of configurations on the Virtex-6 FPGA.