Thermal verification on FPGAs

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. E. Boemo, and S. López-Buedo, "Thermal verification on FPGAs", 23rd in NORCHIP Conference, 2005, p. 48 - 53Thermal verification of complex ICs can help the designer to detect if a particular block is working beyond specifications. A simple method is to extract the output frequencies of an array of ring-oscillators previously distributed in the die. The main advantage is that neither external transducers nor analog parts are necessary. Other possibility is to bias one of the clamping diodes usually present in the pads, and measure its junction forward voltage. In both cases, the measurement of temperature can be done in actual working conditions; that is, with the chip inside the case with its heat sink and fan.This research is supported by project number 07T/0052/2003-3 of the Consejería de Educación de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain