Power blurring: Fast static and transient thermal analysis method for packaged integrated circuits and power devices

High-temperature and temperature nonuniformity in high-performance integrated circuits (ICs) can significantly degrade chip performance and reliability. Thus, accurate temperature information is a critical factor in chip design and verification. Conventional volume grid-based techniques, such as finite-difference and finite-element methods (FEMs), are computationally expensive. In an effort to reduce the computation time, we have developed a new method, called power blurring (PB), for calculating temperature distributions using a matrix convolution technique in analogy with image blurring. The PB method considers the finite size and boundaries of the chip as well as 3-D heat spreading in the heat sink. PB is applicable to both static and transient thermal simulations. Comparative studies with a commercial FEM tool show that the PB method is accurate within 2%, with orders of magnitude speedup compared with FEM methods. PB can be applied to very fine power maps with a grid size as small as 10 μm for a fully packaged IC or submicrometer heat sources in power electronic transistor arrays. In comparison with architecture-level thermal simulators, such as HotSpot, PB provides much more accurate temperature profiles with reduced computation time.