All-Digital Time-Domain Temperature Sensor for Energy Efficient On-Chip Thermal Management

This paper proposes an all-digital time domain temperature sensor based on ring oscillator and counter. Compared to conventional temperature sensor consists of current starved delay line and time to digital converter (TDC), the proposed temperature sensor consumes less power, and achieves better accuracy by using temperature dependent ring oscillator with tunable enable time. According to 7nm finFET based HSPICE simulation results, the error is reduced by 89 % in the proposed structure compared with the conventional structure, and power consumption is reduced by 86% compared to the conventional structure.