Abstract
The International Technology Roadmap for Silicon (ITRS) predicted that by the year 2016, a high-performance chip could dissipate as much as 300 W/cm² of heat. Another more noticeable thermal issue in IC's is the uneven temperature distribution. Increased power dissipation and greater temperature variation highlight the need for electrothermal analysis of electronic components. The goal of this research is to develop an experimental infrared measurement technique for the thermal and electrothermal analysis of electronic circuits. The objective of the electrothermal analysis is to represent the behavior of the temperature dependent characteristics of electronic device in near real work condition. An infrared (IR) thermography setup to perform the temperature distribution analysis and power dissipation measurement of the device under test is proposed in this reasearch. The system is based on a transparent oil heatsink which captures the thermal profile and run-time power dissipation from the device under test with a very fine degree of granularity. The proposed setup is used to perform the thermal analysis and power measurement of an Intel Dual Core E2180 processor. The power dissipation of the processor is obtained by calculating and measuring the heat transfer coefficient of the oil heatsink. Moreover, the power consumption of the processor is measured by isolating the current used by the CPU at run time. A three-dimensional fininte element thermal model is developed to simulate the thermal properties of the processor. The results obtained using this simulation is compared to the experimental results from IR thermography. A methodology to perform electrothermal analysis on integrated circuits is introduced. This method is based on coupling a standard electrical simulator, which is often used in the design process, and IR thermography system through an efficient interface program. The proposed method is capable of updating the temperature dependent parameters of device in near real time. The proposed method is applied to perform electrothermal analysis of a power MOSFET to measure the temperature distribution and the device performance. The DC characteristics of the device are investigated. The obtained results indicated that the operating point, I-V characteristics and power dissipation of the MOSFET vary significantly with temperature.
Highlights
IntroductionTechnology scaling and increasing circuit density (Moore's law) will continue in spite of tremendous technology development barriers, design challenges, and prohibitive costs
If heat is not removed at a rate equal to or greater than its rate of generation, junction temperatures will rise, reducing mean time to failure (MTTF) for the devices [1]
There is a third source of power dissipation in CMOS circuits, short-circuit current, which results from both transistors in a CMOS circuit being on at the same time while the input switches, the short-circuit component is small and negligible [57]
Summary
Technology scaling and increasing circuit density (Moore's law) will continue in spite of tremendous technology development barriers, design challenges, and prohibitive costs. Miniaturization of electronic devices and circuits has lead to the emergence of self-heating as a critical bottleneck to the performance and reliability of emerging electronic circuits and systems. The continuous and aggressive scaling of CMOS IC technology has resulted in higher performance at the expense of higher power consumption, higher operating temperatures and reduced reliability. Device reliability has a direct impact on the overall system reliability Removing heat from these devices is a major task facing design engineers of modem electronic systems concerned with improving reliability [2] and electrothermal analysis has become an important part of modem electronic design enabling designer to calculate the critical thermal variables as key factors in electrical analysis and accurate performance [3]
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