Abstract
Power densities in the high-performance VLSI chips are increasing vastly. Transistors dissipate power during operation; the faster the operation’s speed is, the more heat is generated. This leads to the rise of temperature in chips. Thus, many cooling solutions, those were dependent on the temperature sensor for detection of temperature, were presented to manage the heat dissipation.This thesis presents a temperature sensor as a basic building unit in a multi-sensor based temperature sensing system. The dependence of leakage currents and temperature is utilized to develop a temperature sensor as a basic unit of a temperature sensor scheme. Exhibiting an acceptable accuracy of 1.3oC, the proposed sensor is characterized by a pretty low area overhead of 0.001mm2 and the low power consumption of 250 uW. The proposed multi-sensors architecture can be much more robust than single sensor version and the calibration cost can be reduced. Applying this temperature sensing method in dynamic thermal management, the VLSI circuits are more reliable and operated in a safer environment.