skip to main content
research-article

Low-cost sensing with ring oscillator arrays for healthier reconfigurable systems

Authors Info & Claims
Published:23 March 2012Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

Electronic systems on a chip increasingly suffer from component variation, voltage noise, thermal hotspots, and other subtle physical phenomena. Systems with reconfigurability have unique opportunities for adapting to such effects. Required, however, are low-cost, fine-grained methods for sensing physical parameters. This article presents powerful, novel approaches to online sensing, including methods for designing compact reconfigurable sensors, low-cost threshold detection, and several enhanced measurement procedures. Together, the approaches help enable systems to autonomously uncover a wealth of physical information. A highly efficient counter and improved ring oscillator are introduced, enabling an entire sensor node in just 8 Virtex-5 LUTs. We describe how variations can be measured in delay, temperature, switching-induced IR drop, and leakage-induced IR drop. We demonstrate the proposed approach with an experimental system based on a Virtex-5, instrumented with over 100 sensors at an overhead of only 1.3%. Results from thermally controlled experiments provide some surprising insights and illustrate the utility of the approach. Online sensing can help open the door to physically adaptive computing, including fine-grained power, reliability, and health management schemes for systems on a chip.

References

  1. Abuhamdeh, Z., Hannagan, B., Crouch, A. L., and Remmers, J. 2007. A production IR-drop screen on a chip. IEEE Des. Test Comput. 24, 3, 216--224. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Ajami, A. H., Banerjee, K, Mehrotra, A., and Pedram, M. 2003. Analysis of IR-drop scaling with implications for deep submicron PIG network designs. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Quality Electronic Design. 35--40. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Aloisio, A, Branchini, P., Cicalese, R., Giordano, R., Izzo, V., and Loffredo, S. 2007. FPGA implementation of a high-resolution time-to-digital converter. In Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record. 504--507.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. Betz, V. 2010. FPGAs at 28nm: meeting the challenge of modern systems-on-a-chip. In Proceedings of the Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. Boemo, E. and López-Buedo, S. 1997. Thermal monitoring.on FPGAs using ring-oscillators. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications. 69--78. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. Bongard, J., Zykov, V., and Lipson, H. 2006. Resilient machines through continuous self-modeling. Science 314, 5802, 1118--1121.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Chen, P., Shie, M., Zheng, Z.-Y, Zheng, Z.-F., and Chu, C. 2007. A fully digital time-domain smart temperature sensor realized with 140 FPGA logic elements. IEEE Trans. Circ. Syst. 1, 54, 12, 2661--2668.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. Cheng, L., Xiong, J., He, L., and Hutton, M. 2006. FPGA performance optimization via chipwise placement considering process variations. In Proceedings of the Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications. 1--6.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. Clark, D. and Weng, L. 1994. Maximal and near-maximal shift register sequences: efficient event counters and easy discrete logarithms. IEEE Trans. Comput. 43, 5, 560--568. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Conn Jr., R. 2000. Method and apparatus for measuring localized temperatures on integrated circuits. U.S. Patent 6067508.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Dighe, S., Vangal, S., et al. 2010. Within-die variation-aware dynamic-voltage-frequency scaling core mapping and thread hopping for an 80-core processor. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Solid-State Circuits. 174--175.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  12. Filanovsky, L. M. and Allam, A. 2001. Mutual compensation of mobility and threshold voltage temperature effects with applications in CMOS circuits. IEEE Trans. Circ. Syst. 1 48, 7, 876--884.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. Flatley, T. 2010. Advanced hybrid on-board science data processor—SpaceCube 2.0. In Proceedings of the Earth Science Technology Forum.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  14. Fletcher, J., Perlman, M., Rousey, W., and Messner, A. 1975. System for generating timing and control signals. U.S. Patent 3866022.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. Franco, J. J. L., Boemo, E., Castillo, E., and Parrilla, L. 2010. Ring oscillators as thermal sensors in FPGAs: Experiments in low voltage. In Proceedings of the Southern Programmable Logic Conference. 133--137.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. 2011. http://www.itrs.net.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Jiang, N. and Parashar, M. 2009. Enabling autonomic power-aware management of instrumented data centers. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing. 1--8. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Jones, P. H., Moscola, J., Cho, Y. H., and Lockwood, J. W. 2007. Adaptive thermoregulation for applications on reconfigurable devices. In Proceedings of the Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications. 246--253.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Joseph, R., Brooks, D., and Martonosi, M. 2003. Control techniques to eliminate voltage emergencies in high performance processors. In Proceedings of the Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture. 79--90. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  20. Kaxiras, S. and Xekalakis, P. 2004. 4T-decay sensors: a new class of small, fast, robust, and low-power, temperature/leakage sensors. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design. 108--113. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. Kohlbrenner, P. and Gaj, K. 2004. An embedded true random number generator for FPGAs. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays. 71--78. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. Krishnamoorthy, A. and Detofsky, A. 2007. Mapping variations in local temperature and local power supply voltage that are present during operation of an integrated circuit. U.S. Patent 7233163.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Lalgudi, S. N., Kretchmer, Y. K., and Swaminathan, M. 2005. Simulation of switching noise in on-chip power distribution networks of FPGAs. In Proceedings of the Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging. 319--322.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. Lewis, D. M., Ahmed, E., Cashman, D., Vanderhoek, T., Lane, C., Lee, A., and Pan, P. 2009. Architectural enhancements in Stratix-Ill and Stratix-IV. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. 33--42. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. López-Buedo, S. and Boemo, E. 1997. A method for temperature measurement on reconfigurable systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Design of Circuit and Integrated Systems. 727--730.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  26. López-Buedo, S. and Boemo, E. 2004. Making visible the thermal behavior of embedded microprocessors on FPGAs: A progress report. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays. 79--86. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. Mangalagiri, P., Bae, S., Krishnan, R., Xie, Y., and Narayanan, V. 2008. Thermal-aware reliability analysis for platform FPGAs. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Aided Design. 722--727. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  28. Muhtaroglu, A., Taylor, G., and Rahal-Arabi, T. 2004. On-die droop detector for analog sensing of power supply noise. IEEE J. Solid-State Circ. 39, 4, 651--660.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  29. Quénot, G. M., Paris, N., and Zavidovique, B. 1991. A temperature and voltage measurement cell for VLSI circuits. In Proceedings of the European ASIC. 334--338.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. Sedcole, P. and Cheung, P. 2006. Within-die delay variability in 90nm FPGAs and beyond. In Proceedings of the Conference on Field Programmable Technology. 97--104.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  31. Sheldon, D., Roosta, R., Sadigursky, M., and Farrokhy, A. 2007. Monitoring temperature in SRAM-based FPGAs using a ring-oscillator design. In Proceedings of the Military and Aerospace FPGA and Applications Meeting.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  32. Srinivasan, S. and Narayanan, V. 2006. Variation aware placement for FPGAs. In Proceedings of the Conference on Emerging VLSI Technology and Architectures. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  33. Sun, J., Bittner, R., and Eguro, K. 2011. FPGA side-channel receivers. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. 267--276. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  34. Sylvester, D., Blaauw, D., and Karl, E. 2006. ElastIC: An adaptive self-healing architecture for unpredictable silicon. IEEE Des. Test Comput. 23, 6, 484--490. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  35. Takahashi, T., Uezono, T., Shintani, M., Masu, K., and Sato, T. 2009. On-die parameter extraction from path-delay measurements. In Proceedings of the IEEE Asian Conference on Solid-State Circuits. 101--104.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  36. Vahid, F., Stitt, G., and Lysecky, R. 2008. Warp processing: dynamic translation of binaries to FPGA circuits. IEEE Comput. 41, 7, 40--46. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  37. Velusamy, S., Huang, W., Lach, J., and Skadron, K. 2004. Monitoring temperature in FPGA based SoCs. CS Tech. rep. CS-2004-39, University of Virginia.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  38. Wolpert, D. and Ampadu, P. 2009. A sensor to detect normal or reverse temperature dependence in nanoscale CMOS circuits. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems. 193--201. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  39. Wong, H. Y., Cheng, L., Lin, Y., and He, L. 2005. FPGA device and architecture evaluation considering process variations. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Aided Design. 19--24. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  40. Wu, C. and Verma, D. 2008. A sensor placement algorithm for redundant covering based on Riesz energy minimization. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Circuits and Systems. 2074--2077.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  41. Wu, T.-Y., Gharahi, S., and Abraham, J. A. 2009. An area efficient on-chip static IR drop detector/evaluator. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Circuits and Systems. 2009--2012.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  42. Xilinx Inc. 1997. XC3000 series technical information. XAPP 024 (v 1.0).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  43. Xilinx Inc. 2007. Linear feedback shift registers in virtex devices. App. note XAPP210 (v1.3).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  44. Xilinx Inc. 2009. Xilinx UG 192 Virtex-5 FPGA System Monitor User Guide, v1. 7.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  45. Xilinx Inc. 2010. Radiation-hardened, space-grade Virtex-5QV device overview. DS192 (v1.1).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  46. Xilinx Inc. 2011. Lowering power at 28 nm with Xilinx 7 series FPGAs. WP389 (v1.0).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  47. Zick, K. M. and Hayes, J. P. 2010a. On-line sensing for healthier FPGA systems. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. 239--248. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  48. Zick, K. M. and Hayes, J. P. 2010b. Self-test and adaptation for random variations in reliability. In Proceedings of the Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications. 193--198. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  49. Zick, K. M. and Hayes, J. P. 2010c. Toward physically-adaptive computing. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems. 124--133. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Low-cost sensing with ring oscillator arrays for healthier reconfigurable systems

            Recommendations

            Comments

            Login options

            Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

            Sign in

            Full Access

            PDF Format

            View or Download as a PDF file.

            PDF

            eReader

            View online with eReader.

            eReader
            About Cookies On This Site

            We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

            Learn more

            Got it!