Interconnect thermal simulation with higher order spatial accuracy

Yijiang Shen, Ngai Wong, Edmund Y. Lam

Abstract: This paper reports on a numerical analysis of interconnect thermal profile with fourth-order accuracy in space. The interconnect thermal simulation is described in a partial differential equation (PDE), and solved by finite difference time domain (FDTD) techniques using a fourth-order approximation of the spatial partial derivative in the PDE. A recently developed numerically stable algorithm for inversion of block tridiagonal and banded matrices is applied when the thermal simulation is conducted using Crank-Nicolson method with fourth-order spatial accuracy. We have promising simulation results, showing that the proposed method can have more accurate temperature profile before reaching the steady state than the traditional menthols and the runtime is linearly proportional to the number of nodes.