Comparison between latency insertion method (LIM) and relaxation method in thermal integrity analysis

This paper describes comparisons between the latency insertion method (LIM) and the successive over-relaxation (SOR) method in a thermal integrity analysis. A recent research indicates that LIM is adequate for the thermal simulation based on a resistive equivalent circuit model, which basically requires a DC analysis, though the method is one of the transient analysis methods. On the other hand, as is well known, the resistive network can be solved efficiently by using an iterative method such as the SOR method. We discuss the efficiencies of the methods by comparing the numerical results of example thermal simulations for a microchannel structure in a three-dimensional integrated circuit.