Thermal design of integrated circuit devices

An analytical solution derived by the authors (1986) for the thermal analysis of multisource, four-layer ICs has been useful in simulating device thermal properties. However, in the simulation of structures with large chip-to-heat-source size ratios, the computer program based on the exact solution requires a substantial amount of CPU time, making it impossible to carry out real-time thermal design of ICs having large numbers of small heat sources. A method is presented for the computer-aided thermal design of ICs in real time. This method uses a multiple regression technique whose input is the thermal profile due to a unit heat source over a multilayered unit structure. The profile in two dimensions is matched to an equation having several parameters. The temperature profiles of other devices having the same layered structure is computed by superposing the profile generated by the matched equation, shifted in position according to the source location and weighted by the source power