Modeling and simulation for transient thermal analyses using a voltage-in-current latency insertion method

Abstract

This article presents a modeling and simulation method for transient thermal analyses of integrated circuits (ICs) using the original and voltage-in-current (VinC) latency insertion method (LIM). LIM-based algorithms are a set of fast transient simulation methods that solve electrical circuits in a leapfrog updating manner without relying on large matrix operations used in conventional Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE)-based methods which can significantly slow down the solution process. The conversion from the thermal to electrical model is performed first by using the analogy between heat and electrical conduction. Since electrical inductance has no thermal equivalence, a modified VinC LIM formulation is presented which removes the requirement of the insertion of fictitious inductors. Numerical examples are presented which show that the modified VinC LIM formulation outperforms the basic LIM formulation, both in terms of stability and accuracy in the transient thermal simulation of ICs.