Thermal Resistance Network Derivative (TREND) Model for Efficient Thermal Simulation and Design of ICs and Packages

In the thermal design of 3-D integrated circuits (ICs) and packages, numerical simulation is extensively employed to investigate the impact of model parameters on hotspot temperature. However, conventional simulation approaches usually require plenty of computational resource and thus lead to expensive time cost for thermal designs. In this paper, we present a novel technique to efficiently and accurately conduct thermal simulation of 3-D ICs and packages, potentially reducing thermal design timeline from weeks to minutes. The proposed thermal resistance network derivative (TREND) model facilitates to focus the solution domain on the crucial regions for thermal designs and accelerate simulation without sacrificing accuracy. Also, the TREND model protects the internal details of chips and packages, which is quite suitable for modular thermal designs. The flexibility, accuracy, and efficiency of the proposed method are demonstrated through several numerical examples. Compared with the commercial software, a speed-up of 2695x is achieved in a typical thermal design case without the loss of accuracy.