Direct electro-thermal simulation of integrated circuits using standard CAD tools

The constant scaling of integrated devices is accompanied by an increase of on-chip current and power densities which are responsible for important thermal issues. Designers need efficient electro-thermal simulators to deal with such issues. The paper presents a simulator which allows to take accurately the thermal aspects into account through the coupling of an automatically generated thermal network with the electronic circuit schematic. The resulting electro-thermal simulator can be classified as a direct simulator which uses standard CAD tools. First simulation results are given to validate the approach.