Full-chip thermal analysis for the early design stage via generalized integral transforms

Abstract

The capability of predicting the temperature profile is critically important for circuit timing estimation, leakage reduction, power estimation, hotspot avoidance, and reliability concerns during modern IC designs. This paper presents an accurate and fast analytical full-chip thermal simulator for the early-stage temperature-aware chip design. By using the technique of generalized integral transforms (GIT), our proposed method can accurately estimate the temperature distribution of full-chip with very small truncation points of bases in the spatial domain. We also develop a fast Fourier transform (FFT) like evaluating algorithm to efficiently evaluate the temperature distribution. Experimental results confirm that our GIT based analyzer can achieve an order of magnitude speedup compared with a highly efficient Green's function based method.