VT-State Condition Monitoring in Integrated Circuits Using Fusion of Information From General Purpose Sensors

S. Lesecq, L. Vincent, E. Beigne, and Ph Maurines.
In 12th International Forum on Embedded MPSoC and Multicore, July 9th-13rd, 2012, Quebec, Canada, July 2012. http://www.mpsoc-forum.org/previous/2012/index.htm
Today mobile computing platforms need ever-increasing computational performances while their energy consumption is drastically limited by battery lifespan. An optimal operating point is obtained thanks to a compromise between performance and power consumption. For distributed architectures, the supply voltage and the operating frequency of each processing element can be tuned dynamically to reach efficient performance/power consumption trade-offs. As a consequence, the physical state (e.g. actual supply voltage and temperature) of the integrated circuit must be monitored to locally adapt the chip parameters. A new method has been developed to estimate the supply voltage and temperature of a local area in an integrated circuit. The raw measurements are acquired form standard ring oscillators buried in the chip and the sensor fusion technique makes use of statistical tests.