Thermap: a thermal model for microprocessors

Author

Fitch, John ; Monier, Louis ; Tamet, Hervé

Author_Institution

Western Res. Lab., Digital Equipment Corp., Palo Alto, CA, USA

fYear

1994

fDate

4-7 May 1994

Firstpage

148

Lastpage

155

Abstract

Thermap is a numerical model which predicts the temperature of a multilayered stack of materials. Heat flux and temperature may be prescribed at any node. Thermap may gather the heat flux boundary descriptions from a VLSI CAD tool in order to simulate a microprocessor. This can be done with very fine spatial resolution. The thermal conductivities may be temperature dependent. Residual iteration, grid refinement, and efficient use of data structures allow Thermap to converge quickly. A graphical server called ezd is used to view the resulting images of power or temperature. Thermap´s temperature predictions agree well with an infrared measurement of a real microprocessor

Keywords

circuit analysis computing; electronic engineering computing; microprocessor chips; modelling; numerical analysis; packaging; temperature distribution; thermal analysis; thermal conductivity; Thermap; VLSI CAD tool; data structures; ezd; graphical server; grid refinement; heat flux; heat flux boundary descriptions; microprocessors; multilayered stack of materials; numerical model; residual iteration; temperature predictions; thermal conductivities; thermal model; Circuits; Design automation; Laboratories; Microprocessors; Postal services; Safety; Temperature; Thermal conductivity; Threshold voltage; Very large scale integration;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Thermal Phenomena in Electronic Systems, 1994. I-THERM IV. Concurrent Engineering and Thermal Phenomena., InterSociety Conference on

Conference_Location

Washington, DC

Print_ISBN

0-7803-1372-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ITHERM.1994.342903

Filename

342903