Mutual Information-Driven Thermal Sensor Planning Method Assisting On-chip Temperature Monitoring at Device-Level Granularity

On-chip temperature monitoring is becoming increasingly significant in preventing local over-heating and managing the reliability of electronic system, especially in 3Dstacked chips. A cost-effective thermal sensor planning method that assists in accurate temperature tracking in different application scenarios is highly desired. Therefore, we propose a mutual information (MI)-based technique to allocate the limited thermal sensors while maintaining a high level of accuracy in full thermal maps (resolution: <1 K). The thermal analysis workflow to assist in the hotspots monitoring from the standard cell level down to the device level is presented, aiming at effectively capturing the time-varying and scenario-dependent thermal responses with finer granularity. The results suggest that the proposed method exhibits lower errors compared to existing approaches that use the same number of thermal sensors, and also shows great robustness in unknown scenarios.