Temperature-aware dynamic frequency and voltage scaling for reliability and yield enhancement

A novel oscillation-based on-chip thermal sensing architecture for dynamically adjusting supply voltage and clock frequency in system-on-chip (SoC) is proposed. It is shown that the oscillation frequency of a ring oscillator reduces linearly as the temperature rises, and thus provides a good on-chip temperature sensing mechanism. An efficient dynamic frequency-to-voltage scaling (DF2VS) algorithm is proposed to dynamically adjust supply voltage according to the oscillation frequencies of the ring oscillators distributed in SoC so that thermal sensing can be carried at all potential hot spots. An on-chip Dynamic Voltage Scaling or Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVS or DVFS) monitor selects the supply voltage level and clock frequency according to the outputs of all thermal sensors. Experimental results on SoC benchmark circuits show the effectiveness of the algorithm that a 10% reduction in supply voltage alone can achieve about 20% power reduction (DVS scheme), and nearly 50% reduction in power is achievable if the clock frequency is also scaled down (DVFS scheme). The chip temperature is reduced accordingly.