System Design and Verification Blogs

The Cadence tool flow is the most comprehensive flow around. If there is an EDA need, you can rest assured that Cadence has a tool that covers that need, and you can be certain that it integrates into the rest of the flow smoothly. In fact, Cadence tools cover every use case so well that we decided to use our tools to analyze our own hardware—in this case, using the Celsius Thermal Solver to analyze a Protium unit’s heat distribution. 

Neat, right? 

So—what is Celsius? Celsius is a thermal solution designed to solve the issues associated with older tools in this space. Old thermal solvers have low accuracy, may have CFD-only solutions, no chip/package integration or PCB solutions, and lack certain 3D IC capabilities. Celsius addresses these problems, with comprehensive integration on the chip, package, and system level, support for Joule heating, capabilities for static and transient analysis, and unmatched accuracy beyond just CFD. Celsius can handle big jobs without any performance or accuracy losses, and it’s scalable across thousands of cores. Plus, it’s fully integrated into the overall Cadence design ecosystem, so it’s easy to pick up and use. 

And what is Protium? Protium is a modern, blade-based hardware and debug software package for early firmware and software development, high performance hardware regression, and full-system validation. Each blade is an air-cooled chassis that dissipates 835W—and the goal of our analysis with Celsius was to predict a given component’s operating temperature. With that info, the cooling system inside each blade could be evaluated and improved. 

The analysis found that a couple of components had a strongly negative temperature margin; and thanks to Celsius’s ability to perform complete system-level thermal analysis, it was determined that a third axial fan solved this problem cleanly. 

That’s not all Celsius can do—it can solve for convection, accurately model the thermal behavior of an IC package or PCB, add thermal or solar radiation to a simulation, and it supports all major CAD formats. Sound like something you need? Check out the Celsius page here.