The influence of an additional sensor on the microprocessor temperature

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of inserting a temperature sensor in the neighbourhood of a chip to monitor the junction temperature. If the sensor is not in the middle of the heat source, the recorded temperature can be quite different from the chip temperature we are mainly interested in. For the steady state temperature, it is rather easy to introduce a correction factor. For the transient behaviour of the temperature, there is a tremendous difference between the chip and the sensor temperature, which cannot be neglected if the temperature is used as a parameter to change, for example, the clock frequency in order to improve the throughput.