Fast Evaluation Method for Transient Hot Spots in VLSI ICs in Packages

Abstract

Recently VLSI IC design is concerned with the large temperature non-uniformity in high power chips. Thus far, thermal simulations have been limited to steady-state worst case conditions, which have caused the use of conservative margins in thermal designs. Transient temperature characteristics were not simulated in prior art chip-level simulations due to the high computational expense. To drastically reduce the time for the chip-level thermal simulations, we have developed a matrix convolution technique, called the Power Blurring (PB) method. Our method renders the temperature profile of a packaged IC with maximum error less than 3% for several case studies done and reduces the computation time by a factor of 100, compared to the simulations done by the industry standard finite element tools.