Novel sensor refines thermal management

TruTherm is a novel thermal management technology that uses a new measuring technique to provide pinpoint-accurate temperature measurement for chips with integrated thermal diodes.

TruTherm is a novel thermal management technology that uses a new measuring technique to provide pinpoint-accurate temperature measurement for chips with integrated thermal diodes.

"Measuring the internal temperature of submicron CPUs and FPGAs with traditional methods generates results that are inaccurate and unpredictable", said Suneil Parulekar, Senior Vice President of National Semiconductor's Analog Products Group.

"To solve this problem, National's new TruTherm technology relies on a new measuring technique to achieve an unmatched level of temperature reading accuracy".

As computing systems and consumer electronics incorporate more submicron processors and FPGAs that tend to run hot, engineers need to design cooling fans into their systems to prevent overheating.

By providing a pinpoint-accurate temperature reading, National's TruTherm technology enables designers to achieve higher levels of performance, extend system life and reduce acoustic noise in systems using central processing unit and graphics processors, field-programmable gate arrays and other integrated circuits developed in 90-nanometre processes and below.

"More accurate temperature readings allow designers to optimise system performance, protect the system processor and lower acoustic noise", said Benson Inkley, Senior Processor Applications Engineer at Intel Corp.

"To support TruTherm technology, Intel will include additional parameters in the datasheet for our new 90nm Pentium 4 processors".

National is producing a family of new temperature sensors featuring TruTherm technology.

The first member of this family, the LM95231, is a high-precision, dual remote-diode temperature sensor with +/-0.75C accuracy.

It features a precision sigma-delta analogue-to-digital convertor for reduced sensitivity to noise and includes digital filtering, remote diode fault detection and local temperature sensing.

The LM95231 is compatible with the SMBus 2.0 and I2C bus specifications.

The LM95231 is designed on National's proprietary, analogue-optimised advanced CMOS process, manufactured at National's wafer fabrication plant in South Portland, Maine, and tested and assembled at the company's facility in Melaka, Malaysia.

National Semiconductor's experts in thermal management design will introduce the TruTherm technology in a tutorial session at the Intel Developer's Forum in San Francisco.

The session: "Improve acoustic performance using a new processor temperature sensing technique", will be held from 1530 to 1620 (local time) on Thursday 3rd March at the Moscone Centre.

Limited samples of the LM95231 temperature sensor, packaged in an 8-pin MSOP, are available now.

Production quantities will be available in May 2005 and priced at $1.50 in 1000-unit quantities.

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