Electrothermal coupling analysis of CMOS gates driving interconnects

This paper presents an analytical electrothermal model for transient thermal analysis of interconnects in highspeed integrated circuits. Firstly, a correspondent transmission line network is established based on the structure of the interconnect system, and then moment matching technique is adopted to simplify the expression of the input impedance. Finally, the thermal responses of an interconnect line excited by a periodic rectangular signal are obtained. The proposed model includes the electrothermal effects that the positive feedback occurs between the electrical and thermal behaviors of interconnects. It is shown that the temperature and the propagation delay of interconnects will increase a lot due to the electrothermal coupling effects, especially for interconnects in high-speed integrated circuits.