Integrated power-thermal management for high performance integrated circuits

This paper describes a methodology which allows more accurate temperature calculation of integrated circuits. Traditional temperature calculation is based on single value of chip power and assumed uniform power distribution. However as chip power increases, the power distribution on the chip surface can be highly non-uniform and therefore uniform power assumption can lead to inaccurate temperature calculation. Circuit and electrothermal analysis which studies the on chip temperature distribution, on the other hand, is mainly based on oversimplified thermal boundary conditions. As a result, its mathematical calculation capability is limited and its accuracy is also affected. In order to improve the accuracy of existing method to account for on chip temperature gradients, an integrated power and thermal calculation approach is used. A computational fluid dynamics analysis is used in this study to address non uniform power distribution temperature calculation for high power integrated circuits. Results will be discussed with highlighted conclusions.