IC Thermal Analyzer for Versatile 3-D Structures Using Multigrid Preconditioned Krylov Methods

Scott Ladenheim, Yi-Chung Chen, Milan Mihajlovic, Vasileios Pavlidis

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

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Abstract

Thermal analysis is crucial for determining the propagation of heat and tracking the formation of hot spots in advanced integrated circuit technologies. At the core of the thermal analysis for integrated circuits is the numerical solution of the heat equation. Prior academic thermal analysis tools typically compute temperature by applying finite difference methods on uniform grids with time integration methods having fixed time step size. Additionally, the linear systems arising from the discretized heat equation are solved using direct methods based on matrix factorizations. Direct methods, however, do not scale well as the problem size increases. Moreover, most of the tools support only 2-D or a limited number of 3-D technologies. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel thermal analyzer with the ability to model both 2-D and 3-D circuit technologies. The analyzer solves the heat equation using the finite element method for the spatial discretization coupled with implicit time integration methods for advancing the solution in time. It also offers fully adaptive spatio-temporal refinement features for improved accuracy and computational efficiency. The resulting linear systems are solved by a multigrid preconditioned Krylov subspace iterative method, which gives superior performance for 3-D transient analyses. The analyzer is shown to accurately capture the propagation of heat in both the horizontal and vertical directions of integrated systems.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2016 International Conference On Computer Aided Design
PublisherIEEE
Number of pages6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 23 Jan 2017
Event2016 International Conference On Computer Aided Design - Austin, Texas, United States
Duration: 7 Nov 201610 Nov 2016
https://iccad.com/

Publication series

Name2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD)
PublisherIEEE
ISSN (Electronic)1558-2434

Conference

Conference2016 International Conference On Computer Aided Design
Abbreviated titleICCAD 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
Period7/11/1610/11/16
Internet address

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