The MTA: An Advanced and Versatile Thermal Simulator for Integrated Systems
The MTA: An Advanced and Versatile Thermal Simulator for Integrated Systems
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DOI：
10.1109/tcad.2018.2789729
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发表时间：
2018-01
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
S. Ladenheim;Yi-Chung Chen;M. Mihajlovic;V. Pavlidis
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
S. Ladenheim;Yi-Chung Chen;M. Mihajlovic;V. Pavlidis
快速准确的热分析对于确定热量传播和跟踪集成电路 (IC) 中热点的形成至关重要。现有的学术热分析工具主要使用紧凑模型来加速热模拟，但仅限于相对简单的电路几何形状的线性问题。曼彻斯特热分析仪 (MTA) 是一款综合工具，可对复杂的物理结构（包括 IC、封装和散热器）进行快速、高精度的线性和非线性热仿真。 MTA 针对 2.5/3-D IC 设计，但也处理标准平面 IC。 MTA使用有限元方法离散空间热方程，并使用无条件稳定隐式时间步进方法进行时间积分。为了在不牺牲准确性的情况下提高计算效率，MTA 具有自适应时空细化功能。模拟过程中出现的大规模线性系统可通过快速预处理 Krylov 子空间方法进行求解。 MTA 支持实际集成系统的热分析，并超越现有学术热模拟器的计算能力和性能。例如，对连接到散热器的封装中的处理器进行仿真，并通过由超过 300 万个节点组成的计算网格进行建模，只需不到 3 分钟。 MTA 是完全并行且公开可用的。1
Fast and accurate thermal analysis is crucial for determining the propagation of heat and tracking the formation of hotspots in integrated circuits (ICs). Existing academic thermal analysis tools primarily use compact models to accelerate thermal simulations but are limited to linear problems on relatively simple circuit geometries. The Manchester Thermal Analyzer (MTA) is a comprehensive tool that allows for fast and highly accurate linear and nonlinear thermal simulations of complex physical structures including the IC, the package, and the heatsink. The MTA is targeted for 2.5/3-D IC designs but also handles standard planar ICs. The MTA discretizes the heat equation in space using the finite element method and performs the time integration with unconditionally stable implicit time stepping methods. To improve the computational efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, the MTA features adaptive spatiotemporal refinement. The large-scale linear systems that arise during the simulation are solved with fast preconditioned Krylov subspace methods. The MTA supports thermal analysis of realistic integrated systems and surpasses the computational capabilities and performance of existing academic thermal simulators. For example, the simulation of a processor in a package attached to a heat sink, modeled by a computational grid consisting of over 3 million nodes, takes less than 3 min. The MTA is fully parallel and publicly available.1