Successful Thermal Management of 3D-ICs: Accurate, Fast, Efficient and Scalable with Celsius

By Melika Roshandell

Today’s modern electronic designs require ever more functionality and performance to meet consumer demand. These requirements make scaling traditional, flat, 2D-ICs very challenging.  With the recent introduction of 3D-ICs into the electronic design industry, IC vendors need to optimize the performance and cost of their devices while also taking advantage of the ability to combine heterogenous technologies and nodes into a single package. And while this greatly advances IC technology, 3D-IC design brings about its own unique challenges and complexities, a major one of which is thermal management.

What’s more, thermal integrity of both 2.5D and 3D electronic designs are further exacerbated by increases in power density and thermal resistance of the dielectric layers between the active devices. Consequently, thermal management of 3D-ICs is quickly becoming a widely recognized technical design challenge for successful and widespread implementation of this technology.

To overcome the issues associated with thermal management, a thermal solution that can handle the complexity of the entire design efficiently and without any simplification is necessary. Due to nature of 3D-ICs, the typical point tool approach that dissects the design space into subsections cannot adequately address this need. This approach also creates longer turnaround time, which can impact critical decision making to optimize design performance. A more effective solution is to utilize a solver that not only has the capacity to import the entire package, PCB, and chiplets, but also offers high performance in order to run the entire analysis in a timely manner.

To this point, Cadence introduced the Celsius Thermal Solver, a unique technology that is integrated with both IC and package design tools, making it the first complete electrothermal co-simulation solution for the full hierarchy of electronic systems from ICs to physical enclosures.

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