Electro-Thermal Analysis of 3D Power Delivery Networks

Reliable design of power delivery networks for three-dimensional integrated circuits face several challenges due to electro-thermal coupling, TSV substrate coupling, long parasitic current paths, frequent and large current demands. Since these challenges are triggered by excessive voltage droop and high temperatures, the need for dedicated methods to model electrical and thermal behavior of 3D systems in an accurate and physically correct way has become inevitable. In this paper, we present PDNETA, an electro-thermal simulation environment based on electrical and thermal macro-models. To emulate a 3D system’s thermal properties equivalent RC-models are developed based on the electrical-thermal duality principle. To verify the accuracy, PDNETA is compared to SPICE, exhibiting up to 96% accuracy and increase in simulation performance of up to 90% for analyzing a three-tier PDN.