Técnicas de verificación térmica para arquitecturas dinámicamente reconfigurables

Thermal verification is an increasingly useful technique in the field of FPGAs (FieldProgrammable Gate-Arrays). There are some reasons for this statement: the increasing capacity of programmable logic devices, the growing capacity and power consumption of the circuits implemented on them, and the development of new design styles, like run-time reconfiguration. In this thesis several possibilities for FPGA-integrated temperature sensors have been studied: ring-oscillators, clamping diodes and dedicated oscillators, embedded by the manufacturer. Among all sensors, ring-oscillators were found to be the best option: they are small and simple, can be placed on any position of the chip in every programmable logic device, and have a good linearity and sensitivity, around 0,2% per °C. By using this technique, a temperature sensor for run-time reconfigurable architectures has been developed, which can be dynamically inserted and eliminated from the FPGA without altering the rest of the circuit. Moreover, a method to eliminate the influence of power supply variations has been developed: this is the major disadvantage of ringoscillators. Finally, this technique has proved to be useful to make thermal maps of an FPGA in real working conditions, a completely new application, impossible to be made with the existing tools. Among its main benefits are applications like detecting hot-spots in the circuit, the quantification of a given cooling option, identifying reconfiguration errors or finding design flaws like bus contentions. Additionally, this thesis opens a new application field for FPGAs: these devices might be very useful for those designers responsible for measuring the thermal parameters of integrated circuits.