Efficient Thermal Simulation for 3-D IC With Thermal Through-Silicon Vias

A novel virtual power source (VPS) method is proposed that can significantly speedup 3-D integrated circuit (IC) thermal simulation with sparely deployed thermal TSVs leveraging Green function-based analytical spectral method. Specifically, it is shown that the impact of TSVs with nonhomogeneous thermal conductivity on thermal simulation may be modeled as VPSs located at mesh grids inside the thermal TSVs. Using this VPS model, the temperature distribution over the entire 3-D IC may be obtained by solving for the thermal distribution of a thermally homogeneous substrate in the presence of these VPSs. As such, the fast spectral method may be applied to accelerate the simulation. Significant (3-100 times) speedup over a baseline finite difference method implementation has been observed in preliminary simulations.