Extraction of Power Dissipation Profile in an IC Chip from Temperature Map

This paper presents a new technique to calculate the power dissipation profile from the IC temperature map using an analogy with image processing and restoration. In this technique, finite element analysis (FEA) is used to find the heat point spread function of the IC chip. Then, the temperature map is used as input for an efficient image restoration algorithm which locates the sources of strong power dissipation non-uniformities. Therefore, for the first time the inverse heat transfer problem was optimally solved, and estimate the IC power map without involving extensive laboratory experiments. This computationally efficient and robust method, unlike some previous techniques in the literature, is applicable to virtually any experimental scenario. Simulation results on a typical commercial IC device confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method.