Comparison With Other Temperature Sensors
The proposed system is compared to other temperature sensors
in Table III. While delay-based sensors can detect timing
failures for any I − T curve and voltage- or leakage-based sensors
can detect overheating for any I − T curve, the proposed
sensor system is able to detect both overheating and timing
failures for any I − T curve. As shown in Fig. 2, the additional
functionality comes at the cost of ∼ 6× area and ∼ 2× power
overhead from the delay-tracking sensor and comparison logic
(assuming the reference sensor consumes similar power to the
delay-tracking sensor); however, as shown in Table III, the total
area and energy values are similar to other sensor designs.
With a linear scaling coefficient, the proposed system occupies
the smallest area after the leakage current-based sensor, with
energy dissipation of a fraction of the voltage-based sensors.
The new functionality and competitive performance make the
proposed system a useful addition for reliable designs.