Thermal Testing on Reconfigurable Computers

.The exhaustive changes of the hardware context in configurable computing machines increase the risk of configuration errors and signal contentions-two situations that produce erroneous processing, reduce system life, or even cause permanent system damnge. Excessive chip heat can also be caused by the peculiarities of a machine configuration: Fine-grain pipeiined data paths, heavily loaded buses, or high offchip capacitance can lead to an unforeseen power overhead. Consequently, the designers of configurable computing machines can detect several failures by adding some thermal monitoring mechanisms. For years, temperature has been a primary parameter of hardware debugging techniques. In the past, low temperature identified bad vacuum tubes. Today, burning ICs points to potential problems. Even in the era of complex instruinentation, hardware designers keep the habit of detecting faulty circuits by touching the chip packages. In this way, the increasing tendency to include temperature sensors on current electronic systems has been a natural step. The concept of thermal testing, introduced in Szgkely et al.,’ is now incorporated intoseveral electronic products. For instance, thermal protections have been adopted in commercial configurable computing machine and two pins connected to an internaI diode have been on Computers