Real time temperature estimation of heat sources in integrated circuits with remote temperature sensors

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretical study of the possibility to carry out real time estimation of power dissipated in electronic integrated circuits based on remote temperature sensor measurements. Due to the damping of the thermal response, the considered inverse problem is ill-posed; hence special attention has to be paid to the estimation process in order to assure the robustness of the obtained results. First, the authors focused on the issue of the proper placement of the temperature sensors for a given heat source configuration. Once the optimal locations of the sensors were determined, the problem of the estimation of the power dissipated in the heat sources was studied in detail. The tests were carried out for the computer generated input data with several noise levels. For the estimation the function specification algorithm with different number of temperature sensors and variable number of averaged measurements was considered. For all the presented thermal simulations as well as for the generation of the test input data, the authors used their own three-dimensional thermal solver employing the Green's function solution of the heat equation. The numerical experiments served as an indication for the design of a real test integrated circuit.