A high efficiency full-chip thermal simulation algorithm

Abstract

Thermal simulation has become increasingly important in chip design, especially in the nanometer regime, where the on-chip hot spots severely degrade the performance and reliability of the circuit and increase the leakage power. In this paper, we present a highly efficient and accurate thermal simulation algorithm that is capable of performing full-chip temperature calculations at the cell level. The algorithm is a combination of several important numerical techniques including the Green function method, the discrete cosine transform (DCT), and the frequency domain computations. Experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve orders of magnitude speedup compared with previous Green function based algorithms while maintaining the same accuracy.