Electrical-thermal co-simulation for DC IR-drop analysis of large-scale integrated circuits

Abstract

For accurate DC IR-drop analysis of integrated circuits, electrical-thermal co-simulation is necessary in order to take into account the effect of Joule heating. A suitable numerical method for this co-simulation is the finite element method due to its capabilities in modeling complex geometries and materials. In order to deal with large-scale problems, a domain decomposition scheme is applied to the finite element method to enable simulation with multiple processors in parallel and achieve significant reduction in computation time.