Dynamic On-Chip Thermal Sensor Calibration Using Performance Counters

作者：Lu Shiting^*; Tessier Russell; Burleson Wayne

来源：IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 2014, 33(6): 853-866.

DOI：10.1109/TCAD.2014.2302384

• Dynamic thermal management (DTM)
• performance counters
• sensor calibration
• thermal estimation
• thermal sensors

Numerous sensors are currently deployed in modern processors to collect thermal information for fine-grained dynamic thermal management (DTM). Due to process variation and silicon aging, on-chip thermal sensors require periodic calibration before use in DTM. However, the calibration cost for thermal sensors can be prohibitively high as the number of on-chip sensors increases. In this paper, a model which is suitable for online calculation is employed to estimate the temperatures of multiple sensor locations on the silicon die. The estimated sensor and actual sensor thermal profile show a very high similarity with correlation coefficient similar to 0.9 for most tested benchmarks. Our calibration approach combines potentially inaccurate temperature values obtained from two sources: temperature readings from thermal sensors and temperature estimations using system performance counters. A data fusion strategy based on Bayesian inference, which combines information from these two sources, is demonstrated along with a temperature estimation approach using performance counters. The average absolute error of the corrected sensor temperature readings is < 1.5 degrees C and the standard deviation of error is less than < 0.5 degrees C for tested benchmarks.

• 出版日期2014-6