NVIDIA Corporation
Techniques for accurately determining the temperature at various locations of an operating integrated circuit

Abstract:

Integrated circuits (ICs)--depending on a current workload--may exceed thermal cooling budgets. As a result, ICs often implement thermal sensors to measure temperatures at junctions or hot spots along the IC. Due to a distance between the thermal sensors and the various junctions, a thermal offset may be added to the temperature readings from the thermal sensors to more accurately estimate the temperature at the junctions. To account for different workload distributions--e.g., asymmetric or symmetric--the systems and methods described herein may dynamically adjust the thermal offsets. As a result, the efficiency of the IC may be increased as thermal settings for the IC may take into account the ability of the thermal cooling budget to effectively cool the IC under a current operating condition--thereby reducing premature throttling back or shutting down of power to the IC.