Celsius Thermal Solver, A New Approach to System-Level Thermal Analysis

The Cadence® Celsius Thermal Solver is the industry’s first complete electrical-thermal co-simulation solution to analyze the entire hierarchy of electronic systems starting from ICs to large physical enclosures.

As the technology nodes are pushed forward to 7nm and 5nm sizes, the power density is increasing, and the self-heating problem is becoming dominant, especially when multiple DIEs are stacked into one package, making it crucial to analyze the thermal behavior.

This empowers electronics design teams to simulate the thermal behavior for the chip, package, and PCB, including the enclosures. From a very small system like a smartphone to complex systems like a data center, thermal analysis can be performed with detail using Celsius Thermal Solver. It analyzes how power dissipates when the system is operational, and correspondingly, its temperature increases, which, in turn, affects its electrical performance.

This is quite challenging to analyze because it requires the integration of different Physics domains like electrical and thermal engineering, including fluid dynamics. Analyzing the electro-thermal system needs the capability to handle the interaction between the Air Flows (fluid) and the chip, package, PCBs (solids); thus, solving the complex physics between the fluids and the solids. At this point, the need is to solve the Finite Element equations with Computational Fluid Dynamics.

It employs the 3D finite element method (FEM) analysis to solve electrical and thermal equations for solid components and the finite volume method (FVM) to solve Navier-Stokes equations for fluid areas of the design.

Here is the block-level representation of the System-Level Electro-Thermal Analysis:

For more information on Cadence Celsius Thermal Solver, click here