Realistic and efficient simulation of electro-thermal effects in VLSI circuits

Needs for electro-thermal simulation of VLSI circuits, as opposed to both the system and device levels, are analyzed. A system capable of modeling these effects in a realistic and sufficiently accurate way that uses a reasonable amount of CPU resources is presented. An innovative solver is also proposed. The system is used to study the importance of some three dimensional (3-D) effects as well as metallic connections. A complete example was treated to have an insight on the type of results to be expected and the corresponding costs in terms of CPU.