Thermal sensor allocation and placement for reconfigurable systems

Abstract

A dynamic monitoring of thermal behavior of hardware resources using thermal sensors is very important to maintain the operation of systems safe and reliable. This article addresses the problem of thermal sensor allocation and placement for reconfigurable systems. For programmable logic arrays, the degree of the use of hardware resources in the systems highly depends on the target application to be implemented, making the allocation of thermal sensors at the manufacturing stage inadequate (or too costly if implemented) due to the unpredictable thermal profile. This means that the thermal sensor allocation could be processed at the time when the reconfigurable logic is implemented (i.e., at the post manufacturing stage). This work proposes an effective solution to the problem of thermal sensor allocation and placement at the post-manufacturing stage. Specifically, we define the Sensor Allocation and Placement Problem (SAPP), and propose a solution which formulates SAPP into the Unate-Covering Problem (UCP) and solves it optimally. Also we combine SAPP with temperature correlation to reduce required sensors more aggressively and propose a solution by applying UCP again. We then provide an extended solution to handle a practical design issue where the hardware resources for the sensor implementation on specific array locations have already been used up by the application logic. Experimental results using MCNC benchmarks show that our proposed technique uses 62.4% and 19.7% less number of sensors to monitor hotspots on the average than that used by the grid-based and the bisection-based approaches while the overhead of auxiliary circuitry is minimized, respectively.