Monitoring of power dissipated in microelectronic structures

A method for monitoring of power dissipated in microelectronic structures is presented in the paper. The method can be applied to active cooling of packaged integrated circuits and can be used for fault diagnosis in VLSI systems. It is presented how the method is implemented as an application specific integrated circuit cell, followed by results of simulations and measurements after fabrication. The paper presents the principle and theoretical considerations of the mean value power monitoring in VLSI systems necessary for proper driving of the active heat sink.