Thermal-aware DC IR-drop co-analysis using non-conformal domain decomposition methods

Abstract

Almost all practical engineering applications are multi-physics in nature, and various physical phenomena usually interact and couple with each other. For instance, the resistivity of most conducting metals increases linearly with increases in the surrounding temperature resulting from Joule heating by electrical currents flowing through conductors. Therefore, in order to accurately characterize the performance of high-power integrated circuits (ICs), packages and printed circuit boards (PCBs), it is essential to account for both electrical and thermal effects and the intimate couplings between them. In this paper, we present non-conformal, non-overlapping domain decomposition methods (DDMs) for thermal-aware direct current (DC) IR drop co-analysis of high-power chippackage-PCBs. Here, IR stands for the finite resistivity (R) of metals and current (I) drawn off from the power/ground planes. The proposed DDM starts by partitioning the composite device into inhomogeneous sub-regions with temperature-dependent material properties. Subsequently, each sub-domain is meshed independently according to its own characteristic features. As a consequence, the troublesome mesh-generation task for complex ICs can be greatly subdued. The proposed thermal-aware DC IR drop co-analysis applies the non-conformal DDM for both conduction and steady-state heattransfer analyses with a two-way coupling between them. Numerical examples, including an IC package and a chip-package-PCB, demonstrate the flexibility and potential of the proposed thermal-aware DC IR-drop co-analysis using non-conformal DDMs.

The Domain Decomposition Method With Adaptive Time Step for the Transient Thermal Analysis of 3-D ICs

“…Instead, the Robin-transmission condition (TC) is enforced by IP weak formulation to guarantee continuities across the subdomain interfaces. Different IP-DDM algorithms also have been proposed and obtained great effectiveness for multiscale models [16], [23], [24], [25].…”

DC IR-Drop Analysis of Power Distribution Networks by a Robin Transmission Condition-Enhanced Discontinuous Galerkin Method

“…Initially, the DC IR-Drop analysis is on the basis of the latency insertion method (LIM) [3] and the equivalent circuit model [4]. Soon after, the electrical-thermal co-simulation has been exploited with numerical algorithms such as the finite element method (FEM) [5]- [7] and the finite volume method (FVM) [8], which are capable of dealing with the complex geometries.…”

DC IR-Drop Analysis of Multilayered Power Distribution Network by Discontinuous Galerkin Method With Thermal Effects Incorporated

“…To capture the thermal effects, soon after, numerical algorithms such as finite volume method (FVM) [5] and finite element method (FEM) [6]- [8] are proposed to solve the electrical and the thermal equations together. Due to the temperature dependent material properties, the two equations are solved in an iterative scheme.…”