Application of PID controller for thermal control in modern Intel® Core™ SoCs

With the increasing speed and density of transistors on chips, the amount of power consumption and dissipation have also increased. The cores in the processor tend to reach higher temperatures than other components. For monitoring and controlling temperature periodically, modern microprocessors have different features in place, to avoid a malfunction or a permanent damage to the cores. However, with increasing complexities in transistor density, core counts, many corner cases arise that causes core temperatures to go beyond set limits. This paper focuses on the application of a feature that uses adaptive PID controller to overcome the drawbacks in conventional thermal monitoring techniques. The PID controllers are one of the most popular controllers used in process control over decades. However, there are other challenges in tuning the PID parameters efficiently and get satisfactory control characteristics. The performance of the controller is evaluated by the improvement in response time and improved oscillation behavior.