A Fast Algorithm for Thermal Transient Multisource Simulation Using Interpolated Zth Functions

This paper presents a very straightforward method to compute the transient thermal response to arbitrary power dissipation profiles in electronic devices with multiple heat sources. Using cubic spline interpolation of simulated or measured unit power step response curves (Zth-functions), additional errors and efforts due to model reduction can be avoided. The simple analytic form of the interpolating splines can be exploited to evaluate the convolution integral of the Zth functions with arbitrary power profiles at low computational costs. For periodic power profiles the speed of the computation can be further enhanced by replacing early pulses with the energy conserving average. An implementation of the algorithm in a spreadsheet program (EXCEL) has demonstrated that the results are in very good agreement with temperature profiles computed by transient finite-element simulation but can be obtained in a fraction of the time.