Development of an electrothermal simulation tool for integrated circuits: Application to a two-transistor circuit

In this paper a methodology for performing electrothermal analyses on integrated circuits is introduced. Using the relaxation method, standard electrical and thermal simulators, which are often used in the design process, are coupled through an efficient interface program. The simulator is capable of performing steady-state and transient analysis at device and chip levels. A variable-time-step technique has been implemented to reduce the computational time for a given set of computational resources. The simulator has been validated on different structures such as the bipolar junction transistor to predict the temperature distribution and the device performance in an amplifier circuit and an integrated current-mirror circuit. The simulation results are compared to experimental results to verify the performance of the electrothermal simulator and the accuracy of the thermal model. Simulation results demonstrate that the approach is suitable to model the thermal effects of integrated circuits in a more time-efficient, accurate and user-friendly fashion.