Optimal allocation and placement of thermal sensors for reconfigurable systems and its practical extension

A dynamic monitoring of thermal behavior of hardware resources using thermal sensors is very important to maintain the operation of systems safe and reliable. This work proposes an effective solution to the problem of thermal sensor allocation and placement for reconfigurable systems at the post-manufacturing stage. Specifically, we define the sensor allocation and placement problem (SAPP), and propose a solution which formulates SAPP into the unate-covering problem (UCP) and solves it optimally. We then provide an extended solution to handle a practical design issue where the hardware resources for the sensor implementation on specific array locations have already been used up by the application logic. Experimental results using MCNC benchmarks show that our proposed technique uses 19.7% less number of sensors to monitor hotspots on the average than that used by the bisection based (Mukherjee et al., 2006) approaches.