A Low Computational Cost and Accurate Thermal Calculation Method for Multi-hotspot IC

As the feature size scaling down, the integration degree increasing, the power density increasing and the introduction of low thermal conductivity material flourishing, the integrated circuit(IC) is facing a serious thermal challenge. Thermal analysis is getting essential for high power IC design. Hotspot, usually constructed by high power devices and BEOL, has been considered as the most urgent concern, with a localized power density above 500 W/cm
²
. In the direct numerical simulation, the great amount of the hotspots and the large size differences contribute to huge mesh numbers, which means high computational cost. In this paper, a new calculation method on hotspots uniformization based on thermal spreading theory and the superposition principle is proposed. Temperature excess distribution can be divided into two parts: the local hotspots temperature distribution and the background distribution. The simplified method is verified by a thermal numerical simulation. The present thermal effectiveness shows potential for the high power IC design.