A Survey of Chip-level Thermal Simulators

Thermal modeling and simulation have become imperative in recent years owing to the increased power density of high performance microprocessors. Temperature is a first-order design criteria, and hence special consideration has to be given to it in every stage of the design process. If not properly accounted for, temperature can have disastrous effects on the performance of the chip, often leading to failure. To streamline research efforts, there is a strong need for a comprehensive survey of the techniques and tools available for thermal simulation. This will help new researchers entering the field to quickly familiarize themselves with the state of the art and enable existing researchers to further improve upon their proposed techniques. In this article, we present a survey of the package level thermal simulation techniques developed over the past two decades.