In-Hole Diodes for on-Chip Thermal Sensing

Self-heating is a major problem to ICs, particularly for complex chips made at advanced technology nodes. Real-time and precision full-chip thermal mapping is essential to realizing chip-scale dynamic thermal management for advanced ICs, which cannot be facilitated by any existing in-die thermal sensing techniques. This paper reports a novel in-hole PN diode thermal sensor concept, which, ideally, can be embedded underneath each transistor, to monitor the temperature of individual transistor in real time with high spatial resolution. Validated in silicon, the new in-hole diode sensors can be used to construct large thermal sensor mesh for the whole chip to achieve transistor-level thermal sensing resolution, however, consuming no extra Si area.