Rapid multi-scale transient thermal modeling of packaged microprocessors using hybrid approach

This paper studies the rapid transient thermal analysis of a packaged high power microprocessor, forced convection cooled using a heat sink. A spatially resolved power map for Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn processor was considered. Two different transient power profiles were investigated: an impulsively applied power map, and an oscillatory variation power map. We extended and demonstrated the capability of a recently developed hybrid approach in modeling several decades of length scale from package to chip at a considerably lower computational cost, while maintaining satisfactory accuracy. The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) technique was used for the rapid prediction of the transient thermal response for impulsive vs. oscillatory power applied to the chip. The results were compared with a detailed finite element (FE) model developed in COMSOL®. The close agreement between the two models confirms the capability of the multi-scale model in rapidly predicting accurate temperature profiles, without performing detailed FE simulations, which can significantly decrease the computational cost in parametric modeling.