Simulation of electrothermal interactions in power integrated circuits

The authors present SETIPIC, a software package which couples electric and thermal simulations to forecast the electrothermal interactions in the first design steps of power integrated circuits. To give a consistent interface to the designer, SETIPIC is integrated in the EDGE CAD system PICMOST, the thermal simulator used by SETIPIC to obtain the thermal distribution on the layout surface in a transient or stationary mode, is also described. It takes into account the chip environment by the connection of different thermal networks, and uses an automatic mesh method to handle the layout configurations. An infrared experimental method is described to characterize the thermal distribution on a chip. This system was used to validate PICMOST. Some simulation results are given