DVS-capable ultra-low-power subthreshold CMOS temperature sensor / by Gregory Toombs.

There are many contemporary contexts in which a small, low-power-consumption temperature sensor is very valuable. Power, area, speed and temperature range factors are important constraints in modern VLSI design. As transistor dimensions decrease, it is possible to lower the operating voltage of circuits, and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) has been successfully implemented in several commercial applications to reduce power consumption. Power density is increasing, and the resultant temperature issues are being addressed by DVS, considered an efficient dynamic thermal management (DTM) technique. DVS/DTM automation techniques require thermal sensors that operate over a range of supply voltages. Therefore, temperature sensor designs such as this one are needed to address these engineering challenges. In this thesis, a DVS-capable ultra-low-power sub threshold temperature sensor in 180 nm CMOS technology is proposed. The design is composed of a proportional-to-absolute-temperature (PTAT) current generator modified for insensitivity to power supply variation. The design is monolithic; the included reference current generator is a peaking source whose input is fed back from the output of the sensor. The design procedure includes empirical parameter extraction from BSIM simulations to yield a transistor model viable for design calculations, and adjustments to biasing and transistor dimensions to minimize power consumption and maintain adequate voltage supply independence and linearity. The design utilizes the exponential characteristics of sub threshold CMOS transistors to construct an output current that is a firstorder Taylor approximation proportional to the thermal voltage. This is the first time such a design scheme is presented

Dynamic temperature estimation of power electronics systems

This thesis proposes a method for accurate temperature estimation of thermally-aware power electronics systems. The duality between electrical systems and thermal systems was considered for thermal modeling. High dimensional thermal models present a challenge for online estimation. RC (resistor-capacitor) circuits that create a tradeoff between accuracy and complexity were used to simulate the dynamic thermal behavior of power electronics. The complexity of the thermal network was further reduced by applying a structure-preserving model order reduction technique. The reduced order thermal model was an RC circuit with fewer capacitors. Preserving the physical correspondence between the reduced order model and the physical system allows the user to use the reduced order thermal model in the sensor placement optimization process. The accuracy of the thermal estimates can be easily increased by increasing the number of sensors in the system. However, a large number of sensors increases the cost and complexity of the system. It might also interfere with the circuit design and create packaging problems. An optimal number and optimal placement of temperature sensors was found. The optimal sensor placement problem was solved by maximizing the trace of observability Gramian. The optimal number of temperature sensors was based on the state estimation error obtained from a Kalman filter. The dynamic thermal behavior of the power electronics systems was represented by a linear state space model by applying the conservation of energy principle. Therefore, assuming Gaussian noise, it is well-known that a Kalman filter is an optimal estimator for such systems. A continuous-discrete Kalman filter was used to estimate the dynamic thermal behavior of power electronics systems using an optimal number of temperature sensors placed at optimal locations. The proposed method was applied on 2-D and 3-D power electronics systems. Theoretical results were validated experimentally using IR thermal imaging and thermocouples. It was shown that the proposed method can accurately reconstruct the dynamic temperature profile of power electronics systems using a small number of temperature sensors

Estimation and Control of Dynamical Systems with Applications to Multi-Processor Systems

System and control theory is playing an increasingly important role in the design and analysis of computing systems. This thesis investigates a set of estimation and control problems that are driven by new challenges presented by next-generation Multi-Processor Systems on Chips (MPSoCs). Specifically, we consider problems related to state norm estimation, state estimation for positive systems, sensor selection, and nonlinear output tracking. Although these problems are motivated by applications to multi-processor systems, the corresponding theory and algorithms are developed for general dynamical systems. We first study state norm estimation for linear systems with unknown inputs. Specifically, we consider a formulation where the unknown inputs and initial condition of the system are bounded in magnitude, and the objective is to construct an unknown input norm-observer which estimates an upper bound for the norm of the states. This class of problems is motivated by the need to estimate the maximum temperature across a multi-core processor, based on a given model of the thermal dynamics. In order to characterize the existence of the norm observer, we propose a notion of bounded-input-bounded-output-bounded-state (BIBOBS) stability; this concept supplements various system properties, including bounded-input-bounded-output (BIBO) stability, bounded-input-bounded-state (BIBS) stability, and input-output-to-state stability (IOSS).We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the system matrices under which a linear system is BIBOBS stable, and show that the set of modes of the system with magnitude 1 plays a key role. A construction for the unknown input norm-observer follows as a byproduct. Then we investigate the state estimation problem for positive linear systems with unknown inputs. This problem is also motivated by the need to monitor the temperature of a multi-processor system and the property of positivity arises due to the physical nature of the thermal model. We extend the concept of strong observability to positive systems and as a negative result, we show that the additional information on positivity does not help in state estimation. Since the states of the system are always positive, negative state estimates are meaningless and the positivity of the observers themselves may be desirable in certain applications. Moreover, positive systems possess certain desired robustness properties. Thus, for positive systems where state estimation with unknown inputs is possible, we provide a linear programming based design procedure for delayed positive observers. Next we consider the problem of selecting an optimal set of sensors to estimate the states of linear dynamical systems; in the context of multi-core processors, this problem arises due to the need to place thermal sensors in order to perform state estimation. The goal is to choose (at design-time) a subset of sensors (satisfying certain budget constraints) from a given set in order to minimize the trace of the steady state a priori or a posteriori error covariance produced by a Kalman filter. We show that the a priori and a posteriori error covariance-based sensor selection problems are both NP-hard, even under the additional assumption that the system is stable. We then provide bounds on the worst-case performance of sensor selection algorithms based on the system dynamics, and show that certain greedy algorithms are optimal for two classes of systems. However, as a negative result, we show that certain typical objective functions are not submodular or supermodular in general. While this makes it difficult to evaluate the performance of greedy algorithms for sensor selection (outside of certain special cases), we show via simulations that these greedy algorithms perform well in practice. Finally, we study the output tracking problem for nonlinear systems with constraints. This class of problems arises due to the need to optimize the energy consumption of the CPU-GPU subsystem in multi-processor systems while satisfying certain Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In order for the system output to track a class of bounded reference signals with limited online computational resources, we propose a sampling-based explicit nonlinear model predictive control (ENMPC) approach, where only a bound on the admissible references is known to the designer a priori. The basic idea of sampling-based ENMPC is to sample the state and reference signal space using deterministic sampling and construct the ENMPC by using regression methods. The proposed approach guarantees feasibility and stability for all admissible references and ensures asymptotic convergence to the set-point. Furthermore, robustness through the use of an ancillary controller is added to the nominal ENMPC for a class of nonlinear systems with additive disturbances, where the robust controller keeps the system output close to the desired nominal trajectory