A Fast Electrothermal Response Analysis Method for Interconnect Circuits With Multiexcitations in Multilayer Packages

The design of package interconnects is increasingly vital as integrated circuits (ICs) continue to shrink in size and increase in density. However, reducing interconnect size may lead to various issues such as increased temperature, resistivity, and decreased reliability. Accurate estimation of the electrothermal response of interconnect structures is crucial in guiding circuit design. In this article, an efficient method for transient thermal analysis has been proposed for interconnect circuits with complex stacking structures and multiexcitations. This method utilizes the tensorial analysis network (TAN) in combination with the Cauer I RC network (i.e., RC-TAN) to analyze the electrothermal sensitivity of package interconnects. Then, the main parameters affecting the electrothermal response and the optimal interconnect layer stacking order can be derived to guide the design of package interconnects. The effectiveness of this method has been verified by comparing the results with those obtained through finite element method (FEM) simulation. It indicates that the proposed method can save up to 99.8% of the computation time compared to FEM. Furthermore, the maximum temperature error is only 1.7% and the steady-state error is below 1%, highlighting the method's high accuracy.