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Electrical-thermal modeling and simulation for three-dimensional integrated systems

The continuous miniaturization of electronic systems using the three-dimensional (3D) integration technique has brought in new challenges for the computer-aided design and modeling of 3D integrated circuits (ICs) and systems. The major challenges for the modeling and analysis of 3D integrated systems mainly stem from four aspects: (a) the interaction between the electrical and thermal domains in an integrated system, (b) the increasing modeling complexity arising from 3D systems requires the development of multiscale techniques for the modeling and analysis of DC voltage drop, thermal gradients, and electromagnetic behaviors, (c) efficient modeling of microfluidic cooling, and (d) the demand of performing fast thermal simulation with varying design parameters. Addressing these challenges for the electrical/thermal modeling and analysis of 3D systems necessitates the development of novel numerical modeling methods.

This dissertation mainly focuses on developing efficient electrical and thermal numerical modeling and co-simulation methods for 3D integrated systems. The developed numerical methods can be classified into three categories. The first category aims to investigate the interaction between electrical and thermal characteristics for power delivery networks (PDNs) in steady state and the thermal effect on characteristics of through-silicon via (TSV) arrays at high frequencies. The steady-state electrical-thermal interaction for PDNs is addressed by developing a voltage drop-thermal co-simulation method while the thermal effect on TSV characteristics is studied by proposing a thermal-electrical analysis approach for TSV arrays.

The second category of numerical methods focuses on developing multiscale modeling approaches for the voltage drop and thermal analysis. A multiscale modeling method based on the finite-element non-conformal domain decomposition technique has been developed for the voltage drop and thermal analysis of 3D systems. The proposed method allows the modeling of a 3D multiscale system using independent mesh grids in sub-domains. As a result, the system unknowns can be greatly reduced. In addition, to improve the simulation efficiency, the cascadic multigrid solving approach has been adopted for the voltage drop-thermal co-simulation with a large number of unknowns.

The focus of the last category is to develop fast thermal simulation methods using compact models and model order reduction (MOR). To overcome the computational cost using the computational fluid dynamics simulation, a finite-volume compact thermal model has been developed for the microchannel-based fluidic cooling. This compact thermal model enables the fast thermal simulation of 3D ICs with a large number of microchannels for early-stage design. In addition, a system-level thermal modeling method using domain decomposition and model order reduction is developed for both the steady-state and transient thermal analysis. The proposed approach can efficiently support thermal modeling with varying design parameters without using parameterized MOR techniques.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/50307
Date13 January 2014
CreatorsXie, Jianyong
ContributorsSwaminathan, Madhavan
PublisherGeorgia Institute of Technology
Source SetsGeorgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation
Formatapplication/pdf

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