A 700-<i>μ</i>m², Ring-Oscillator-Based Thermal Sensor in 16-nm FinFET
Yosef Lempel, Rinat Breuer, Joseph Shor
Abstract
Temperature monitoring and regulation is a critical power/performance feature in microprocessors. Due to the multiplicity of hotspots, a large number of on-die sensors are utilized. This requires them to be highly compact, low energy and fast. A miniaturized current controlled oscillator (CCO) sensor is described for this application. It has an area of only 700 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> in the 16-nm FinFET process, with an energy consumption of 0.25 nJ in a 6.9- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{s}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> conversion. The inaccuracy is within ±1.5 °C peak-to-peak (p-p) over a 130 °C range, at a resolution of 0.32 °C. These characteristics make the circuit attractive for high-density thermal sensing.