Fast Analytical Modeling of Dynamic Thermal Behavior of Semiconductor Devices and Circuits

This paper presents a set of closed-form analytical expressions to approximate the transient solution to the heat equation without requiring any computationally intensive series summation. The parameters of these expressions can be easily extracted from the physical layout for constructing a thermal impedance matrix to be used in a self-consistent electrothermal circuit simulation of a large number of heat sources. These formulations are derived by assuming a small heat source compared to the chip area in a homogeneous chip with the boundary conditions of an adiabatic top and an isothermal bottom. The derivation allows heat sources to be located at a certain depth from the chip top. The expressions have been verified by comparison with 3-D numerical simulations.

[1]  E. J. Diebold,et al.  Transient thermal impedance of semiconductor devices , 1961, Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers Part I Communication and Electronics.

[2]  L. L. Liou,et al.  Thermal analysis and characterization of thermally shunted AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistors , 1995, Proceedings IEEE/Cornell Conference on Advanced Concepts in High Speed Semiconductor Devices and Circuits.

[3]  Andrea Irace,et al.  Analysis of the UIS behavior of power devices by means of SPICE-based electrothermal simulations , 2013, Microelectron. Reliab..

[4]  Vincenzo d'Alessandro,et al.  A critical review of thermal models for electro-thermal simulation , 2002 .

[5]  V. d’Alessandro,et al.  Analysis of Electrothermal Effects in Bipolar Differential Pairs , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[6]  Arvind Sridhar,et al.  Thermal modeling and analysis of 3D multi-processor chips , 2010, Integr..

[7]  A. G. Kokkas Thermal analysis of multiple-layer structures , 1974 .

[8]  V. d'Alessandro,et al.  Analysis of the Bipolar Current Mirror Including Electrothermal and Avalanche Effects , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[9]  Sung-Mo Kang,et al.  Electrothermal Analysis of VLSI Systems , 2000 .

[10]  E. S. Schlig,et al.  Thermal properties of very fast transistors , 1970 .

[11]  C. Snowden,et al.  Electro-thermal device and circuit simulation with thermal nonlinearity due to temperature dependent diffusivity , 2000 .

[12]  L. Codecasa,et al.  Compact Models of Dynamic Thermal Networks with Many Heat Sources , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Components and Packaging Technologies.

[13]  M. Schroter,et al.  Modeling thermal resistance in trench-isolated bipolar technologies including trench heat flow , 2002 .

[14]  V. d'Alessandro,et al.  Dynamic electrothermal analysis of bipolar devices and circuits relying on multi-port positive fraction Foster representation , 2012, 2012 IEEE Bipolar/BiCMOS Circuits and Technology Meeting (BCTM).

[15]  Niccolò Rinaldi Thermal analysis of solid-state devices and circuits: an analytical approach , 2000 .

[16]  Wen-Chau Liu,et al.  Thermal coupling in 2-finger heterojunction bipolar transistors , 1995 .

[17]  Jean-Baptiste Kammerer,et al.  3D electro-thermal simulations of analog ICs carried out with standard CAD tools and Verilog-A , 2011, 2011 17th International Workshop on Thermal Investigations of ICs and Systems (THERMINIC).

[18]  R. Scherer,et al.  Design and fabrication of thermally-stable AlGaAs/GaAs microwave power HBTs , 1993, Proceedings of IEEE/Cornell Conference on Advanced Concepts in High Speed Semiconductor Devices and Circuits.

[19]  Niccolò Rinaldi,et al.  On the modeling of the transient thermal behavior of semiconductor devices , 2001 .

[20]  V. d’Alessandro,et al.  Influence of layout design and on-wafer heatspreaders on the thermal behavior of fully-isolated bipolar transistors: Part II - Dynamic analysis , 2010 .

[21]  H. C. de Graaff,et al.  Layout to circuit extraction for three-dimensional thermal-electrical circuit simulation of device structures , 1996, IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst..

[22]  V. Kadambi,et al.  An analysis of the thermal response of power chip packages , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[23]  Computationally Efficient Integration of Complex Thernal Multi-Chip Power Module Models into Circuit Simulators , 2007, 2007 Power Conversion Conference - Nagoya.

[24]  Robert Fox,et al.  A physics-based, dynamic thermal impedance model for SOI MOSFET's , 1997 .

[25]  E. Napoli,et al.  3D electro-thermal simulations of wide area power devices operating in avalanche condition , 2012, Microelectron. Reliab..

[26]  Niccolò Rinaldi,et al.  Influence of layout design and on-wafer heatspreaders on the thermal behavior of fully-isolated bipolar transistors: Part I - Static analysis , 2010 .

[27]  W. B. Joyce,et al.  Thermal resistance of heat sinks with temperature-dependent conductivity , 1975 .

[28]  Robert Fox,et al.  Thermal impedance extraction for bipolar transistors , 1996 .

[29]  Li Shang,et al.  Power, Thermal, and Reliability Modeling in Nanometer-Scale Microprocessors , 2007, IEEE Micro.