A temperature-aware simulation environment for reliable ULSI chip design

Abstract

In this paper, we present a temperature-aware simulation environment, iTAS, which has been developed for the design of thermally reliable ultra-large scale integrated (ULSI) chips. This environment provides advisory information from the early chip design phase to the post-layout analysis phase. Several important applications, including temperature-sensitive timing analysis, efficient on-chip hot-spot identification, and thermally reliable package design are addressed, iTAS can be used not only for reliability checking, but also for better thermal engineering to enhance the overall chip performance.