FEA Simulations for Thermal Distributions of Large Scale 3DIC Packages

Abstract

As the market increases for Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing applications, the geometry of 3-Dimensional Integrated Circuit packages becomes more complicated; therefore, predicting the thermal distributions of the structures becomes not only more important but also more challenging. The physics governing the thermal distribution is a 3-dimensional partial differential equation. In order to predict the thermal distributions, various approaches such as the layer modeling method have been invented. While practical, these approaches solve a simplified version of the differential equation placing an inherent limitation on their capabilities which may be improved upon. In this research we solve the actual differential equation using Finite Element Analysis. Finite Element Analysis is known to produce accurate solutions, albeit being computationally intensive, and may take days to run even with a powerful computer, making it impractical for some applications. In this paper, we present case studies of computing the thermal distributions of large scale 3-dimensional integrated circuit models using XSim. We find that XSim’s solving capabilities are capable of computing accurate thermal distributions of large-scale models in minutes instead of days. This suggests a new way to compute the thermal distributions rapidly and accurately for large 3-Dimensional Integrated Circuit packages, which may bring potential benefits in research, design and development of 3-Dimensional Integrated Circuit packages.

Keywords

• Thermal distribution
• 3DIC
• BBCube
• FEA simulation