Simulation of Electro-Thermal Effects in Device and Circuit

This papers describes a computer environment that supports the simultaneous electrical and thermal interactions at device and chip level. A circuit simulator and a finite element thermal simulator are coupled through an application program interface that synchronizes the transfer of information between two simulators. Temperature dependent thermal conductivity of silicon is taken into account by solving the nonlinear heat diffusion equation. This method is applied to perform electro-thermal analysis of bipolar junction transistor (BJT) to predict the temperature distribution and the device performance in a circuit. The performance of the device was evaluated by coupling both electrical and thermal analysis. In addition, power dissipation was computed for each part of the device including collector, emitter and base. Key-Words: Microelectronics, Electro-thermal Analysis, Thermal Modeling, Numerical Simulation, Si BJT and Thermal Effects.