3-D thermal simulation with dynamic power profiles

On-chip temperature and temperature gradient have been emerging as important design criteria as technology is scaled down to nano-meter regime. There have been several approaches to analyze or simulate the thermal behavior of chips, but all the approaches assume constant average power consumption of each block, which is reasonable when the change in power is localized and transient. However, as the aggressive power management techniques are employed in block level of granularity, power consumption of blocks become fluctuating a lot, which yields a large error with the conventional thermal analysis. A 3-D thermal simulation, with time-varying power consumption of blocks, is proposed in this paper. The partial differential heat conduction equation is solved with finite difference method, and we also employ alternating direction implicit method to decrease the computational complexity. The prototype simulator was designed and tested on several examples.