Novel method for fast FEM simulation of chips with integrated microchannel cooling

Abstract

The research and design of liquid-cooled integrated circuits (IC) relies heavily on accurate simulation. Ideally, finite-element-method (FEM) based tools should be used for this purpose. However, in most cases a fully coupled thermo-fluidic simulation of complex ICs is very time consuming. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel method for thermal simulation of ICs cooled by integrated microchannels which significantly reduces the simulation time. The new approach is based on treating the solidliquid boundary as a convective boundary. It is shown that the proposed model offers very good accuracy in steady-state, with errors below 3°C in every chip point. In transient domain the results are less satisfactory, but still the error can be considered acceptable. Moreover, the simulation times have been reduced by about two orders of magnitude with respect to FEM simulation.