Accurate temperature estimation using noisy thermal sensors

Multicore SOCs rely on runtime thermal measurements using on-chip sensors for DTM. In this paper we address the problem of estimating the actual temperature of on-chip thermal sensor when the sensor reading has been corrupted by noise. Thermal sensors are prone to noise due to fabrication randomness, VDD fluctuations et . This causes discrepancy between actual temperature and the one predicted by thermal sensor. Our experiments estimate this variation to be around 30%. In this paper we present a statistical methodology for predicting the actual temperature for a given sensor reading. We present two techniques: single sensor prediction and multi-sensor prediction. The latter tries to estimate the actual temperature for each sensor (of the many on-chip sensors) simultaneously while exploiting the correlations between temperature and noise of different sensors. When the underlying randomness follows a Gaussian characteristic, we present optimal schemes of estimating the expected temperat...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Yufu Zhang, Ankur Srivastava
• Keywords: Actual Temperature, Computer Architecture, DAC 2009, Sensors, Thermal Sensor