Fine-grain thermal profiling and sensor insertion for FPGAs

– Increasing logic densities and clock frequencies on FPGAs lead to rapid increase in power density, which translates to higher on-chip temperature. In this paper, we investigate the thermal behavior of general applications on fine-grain reconfigurable fabrics and we introduce the premapping sensor insertion problem for thermal monitoring. Our study shows that on average the maximum temperature on the chip is 19.5°C higher than the ambient temperature for a transition density of 0.5 at the primary inputs. For finegrain reconfigurable devices targeted for general applications it is difficult to predict the locations of potential hotspots a priori. However, programmability presents a unique opportunity for effective thermal monitoring. It would allow us to perform a thermal simulation on a given design first and obtain the locations of potential points of interest in a design. Then, in the pre-mapping stage the design can be updated with insertion of thermal sensors. Given a set of ex...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ISCAS
• Authors: Somsubhra Mondal, Rajarshi Mukherjee, Seda Ogrenci Memik
• Keywords: ISCAS 2006, Thermal, Thermal Monitoring, Thermal Sensors