Algorithmic and practical questions of electrothermal circuit simulation

In recent years great attention has been paid to the thermal issues in electronics design on system, board, package and chip level, including thermal and electro-thermal simulation of integrated circuits and MCM-s, or even integrated microsystems. In this paper we address some algorithmic issues regarding the method of simultaneous iteration. With the node reduction algorithm outlined here electro-thermal simulation of large problems becomes feasible. Besides this algorithmic innovation we provide a specification for a modular, platform independent electro-thermal simulator.