On the Deployment of On-Chip Noise Sensors

Abstract

Runtime noise management systems can enforce power integrity without significantly increasing design margins. These systems typically respond to on-chip noise sensors to accurately capture voltage emergencies. Unfortunately, it remains an open problem in the literature how to optimally place a given number of noise sensors for best voltage emergency detection, or how to best set the threshold voltage for these sensors. In this paper, we formally define the problem of noise sensor placement along with a novel sensing quality metric to be maximized. We then put forward an efficient algorithm to solve it, which is proven to attain the best result in the class of polynomial complexity approximations. We further solve the problem to minimize the system failure rate subject to a given runtime performance loss (RPL) constraint. Experimental results on a set of industrial power grid designs show that, compared to a simple average-noise based heuristic and two state-of-the-art temperature sensor placement algorithms aimed at recovering the full map or capturing the hot spots at all times, the proposed method on average can reduce the miss rate of voltage emergency detections by 7.4x, 15x, and 6.2x, respectively. The trade-off between the system failure rate and the RPL is also presented. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the very first in-depth work on noise sensor deployment.