Physically-Based Compact Thermal Modeling — Achieving Parametrization and Boundary Condition Independence

This paper presents an approach of compact thermal modeling — HotSpot, which is parameterized according to design geometrical dimensions and material physical properties. While most existing compact thermal modeling methods facilitate thermal analysis of existing package designs, the HotSpot modeling method is more suitable for the exploration of new designs at both the die level and the package level due to its physically-based parametrization characteristics. Although it may not be as “compact” as other modeling approaches, HotSpot provides much more thermal information of the design, especially at the die level, with negligible computational overhead. We also show that the HotSpot achieves reasonable boundary condition independence (BCI) by comparing it with a DELPHI compact thermal model for a benchmark BGA chip under the same set of boundary conditions.