Parallel computing has gained great attention in recent years due to the rapid growth of applications with large computational requirements. With the advance in technology scaling, future systems-on-chips will have tens or even hundreds of processing elements on a single chip. Due to the high transistor density, it is very important to manage the temperature at difference locations of the chip. Since each processor needs one temperature sensor to monitor its temperature, many monolithic temperature sensors are necessary to be integrated on the same chip. Many temperature sensors have been developed in recent years, but they are not suitable for managing the temperature for thermal-aware multiprocessor-on-a-chip applications. Some of these developed sensors are too large in size for thes...[ Read more ]

Parallel computing has gained great attention in recent years due to the rapid growth of applications with large computational requirements. With the advance in technology scaling, future systems-on-chips will have tens or even hundreds of processing elements on a single chip. Due to the high transistor density, it is very important to manage the temperature at difference locations of the chip. Since each processor needs one temperature sensor to monitor its temperature, many monolithic temperature sensors are necessary to be integrated on the same chip. Many temperature sensors have been developed in recent years, but they are not suitable for managing the temperature for thermal-aware multiprocessor-on-a-chip applications. Some of these developed sensors are too large in size for these applications, as tens or even hundreds of sensors are needed on a single chip. Some of them need a complicated calibration procedure which will significantly increase the production cost.

In this thesis, a simple temperature sensor with inaccuracy of ±1.8°C in the range from 0°C to 100°C and requires only a single temperature point for trimming is proposed. Moreover, an auto-trimming system which can trim the temperature sensor by inputting an enable signal is also proposed to meet the thermal-aware multiprocessor-on-a-chip applications. This proposed temperature sensor has been implemented in AMS 0.35-μm CMOS technology. The chip area of a single temperature sensor is 130μm × 870μm and the controller is 320μm × 820μm. The power-supply sensitivity is 0.25°C/V from 2.2V to 3.3V. The inaccuracy of this temperature sensor, including the process variation, is within ±1.8°C in the range from 0°C to 100°C by trimming at room temperature and ±1°C in the range from 50°C to 100°C by trimming at 80°C.