Fast thermal analysis for CMOS VLSIC reliability

In this paper, we present a fast thermal reliability diagnosis tool (iTHREAD) for CMOS VLSI chips. Unlike existing circuit-level electrothermal simulators, it finds the steady-state temperature distribution, the hot spots, as well as the resulting power consumptions in an extremely efficient way. By using a fast timing simulator with accurate temperature-dependent device models and a novel 3-D analytical thermal simulator, it can easily handle very large circuits. With iTHREAD, temperature-dependent reliability and timing problems of VLSICs can be accurately and quickly predicted. It can be further applied to guide the module placement, timing verification, and many other IC reliability diagnoses.