A novel approach of logi-thermal simulation methodology and implementation for ASIC designs

In this paper a novel methodology for temperature distribution calculation on the surface of standard-cell ICs is presented. As feature size is continously shrinking and power density growing, it is inevitable to take thermal effects into account when designing digital integrated circuits and manufacturing them on an ASIC process. This paper presents a flow based on a standardized toolset, to simulate the temperature distribution on the surface of a digital standard-cell circuit. The flow takes the actual layout of the circuit into account as well as the input stimuli and the power characteristics of the cells. A custom software tool, LogiTherm is also presented that handles communication between logical, analog electrical and thermal simulators.