3D thermal-ADI - An efficient chip-level transient thermal simulator

Recent studies show that the nonuniform thermal distribution on the substrate and interconnects has impact on the circuit reliability and performance. Hence three-dimensional (3-D) thermal analysis is crucial to analyze these effects. In this paper, we present and develop an efficient 3-D transient thermal simulator based on the alternating direction implicit (ADI) method for large scale temperature estimation problems. Our simulator, 3D Thermal-ADI, not only has a linear runtime and memory requirement, but also is unconditionally stable. Detailed analysis of the 3-D nonhomogeneous cases and boundary conditions for on-chip VLSI applications are introduced and presented. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm is not only orders of magnitude faster than the traditional thermal simulation algorithms, but is also highly accurate and memory efficient. The temperature profile of steady state can be reached in few iterations. The software is avaiable on the web [1].