Towards Electro-Thermo-Mechanical Simulation of Integrated Circuits in Standard CAD Environment

Through mechanical coupling, thermal effects can lead to drift in circuits' electrical performances, as well as integrated circuits reliability issues. It is thus necessary to consider thermal, mechanical and electrical effects all together in a self-consistent manner. This work focuses on the electro-thermo-mechanical simulation of integrated circuits in the target of ICs reliability monitoring from the early design stages. An electro-thermo-mechanical simulation tool was developed using the Cadence (R) environment and the Spectre (R) simulator. The simulation principle is based on the direct simulation approach with a mixed compact and finite elements modelling. Three networks, i.e. the electrical, the thermal and the mechanical networks, are directly generated, coupled then simulated using a single simulator, i.e. Spectre (R). This paper discusses our networks modelling approaches. The way the three networks are coupled and simulated is described. The thermo-mechanical model is validated through simulation results, compared with results obtained using COMSOL (R). A first thermo-mechanical simulation of a simple integrated circuit featuring a power device is presented.