On-chip thermal sensors are employed by dynamic thermal management techniques to measure runtime thermal behavior of microprocessors so as to prevent the on-set of high temperatures. The allocation and the placement of thermal sensors directly impact the effectiveness of the dynamic thermal management mechanisms. In this paper, we propose systematic and effective strategies for determining the optimal locations for temperature sensors based on thermal gradient analysis to provide the trade-off between hot spot estimation and full thermal reconstruction. Experimental results indicate the superiority of our techniques and confirm that our proposed methods are able to create a sensor distribution for a given microprocessor architecture.
