Thermal Analysis of High-Power Integrated Circuits and Packages Using Nonconformal Domain Decomposition Method

Abstract

A nonconformal domain decomposition method (DDM) is proposed to solve moderately stiff parabolic partial differential equations in inhomogeneous domains. The proposed nonconformal DDM decomposes the entire problem domain into many nonoverlapping subdomains. Consequently, it is effective in addressing complex thermal problems of electronic systems with multiscaled features. Moreover, the time discretization employed is based on an unconditionally stable and implicit Euler scheme. The unconditionally stable time-marching algorithm is beneficial since the time-step size is no longer governed by the spatial discretization of the mesh, but rather by the desired accuracy. Additionally, this paper includes numerical investigations of the convergence properties of the proposed nonconformal DDM. Finally, numerical results are shown for a chip-package-printed circuit board example with thermal cooling by both natural convection and forced convection of heat sinks.