Electro-thermal simulation of hybrid and VLSI circuits

It has been demonstrated that the simulation of the electrical and thermal aspects of circuit behaviour can be combined via the ASTEC3 software system. The finer the cell mesh the more accurate the results obtained, at the expense of extending the computation. The use of mixed coarse/fine cells reduces this problem and a semi-automatic method of generating the mesh file has been developed. The results obtained from the simulations have been shown to correspond to theoretical predictions and, with some reservations, to the experimental situation. However, further work needs to be done on the effects of convection before the method is fully developed. The advantage of the combined simulation is seen to be a more realistic estimation of the thermal effects as a result of being able to take account of the phasing of the heat generation processes