A survey of on-chip monitors

Abstract

Systems on Chips (SoCs) architecture complexity is result of integrating a large numbers of cores in a single chip. The approaches should address the systems particular challenges such as reliability, performance, and power constraints. Monitoring became a necessary part for testing, debugging and performance evaluations of SoCs at run time, as On-chip monitoring is employed to provide environmental information, such as temperature, voltage, and error data. Real-time system validation is done by exploiting the monitoring to determine the proper operation of a system within the designed parameters. The paper explains the common monitoring operations in SoCs, showing the functionality of thermal, voltage and soft error monitors. The different architectures that are approached by the research community until now are discussed.