An Accurate Interconnect Thermal Model Using Equivalent Transmission Line Circuit

This paper presents an accurate interconnect thermal model for analyzing the temperature distribution of an on-chip interconnect wire. The model addresses the ambient temperatures and the heat transfer rates of the packaging materials. Particularly, the model considers the effect of the interconnect temperature gradients. The paper employs an equivalent transmission line circuit to obtain the temperature distribution solution from the model. Then an O(n) algorithm is introduced to compute the interconnect temperatures. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy of the thermal model, by comparisons with the computational fluid dynamics tool FLUENT.