Fast Computation of Temperature Profiles of VLSI ICs with High Spatial Resolution

The reality of high temperature non-uniformity has become a serious concern in the CMOS VLSI industry limiting both the performance and the reliability of packaged chips. Thus the surface temperature profile of VLSI ICs has become critical information in chip design flow. for fast computation of surface temperature profile, power blurring (PB) method has been developed. This method can be applied to simulations with high spatial resolution, which have been prohibitively expensive with conventional methods. Comparative case studies with different levels of resolution illustrate that not only localized small hot spots can be overlooked but even the average chip temperature can be underestimated, and hence the necessity of thermal simulation with high spatial resolution. Using our PB method, we obtained transistor level thermal map (5times5 mum2 grid) of a 5times5 mm2 chip with a computation time of 20 seconds.