Thermal sensor

National Semiconductor Corporation has announced TruTherm thermal management technology, which uses a new measuring technique to provide accurate temperature measurement for chips with integrated thermal diodes.

Measuring the internal temperature of sub-micron CPUs and FPGAs with traditional methods generates results that are inaccurate and unpredictable. 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 sub-micron 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, 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 nm and below processes.

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 ±0.75°C accuracy. It features a precision sigma-delta analog-to-digital converter 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.