Thermap: a thermal model for microprocessors

Thermap is a numerical model that predicts the steady-state temperature of a multilayered stack of materials, which might include voids. Heat flux and temperature can be prescribed at any node. Thermap gathers the heat flux boundary descriptions from a VLSI CAD tool in order to simulate a microprocessor. This can be done with very fine spatial resolution. Thermal conductivities can be temperature dependent. Residual iteration, grid refinement, and efficient use of data structures allow Thermap to converge quickly. A graphical server called ezd is used to view the resulting images of power or temperature. Thermap's temperature predictions are compared with an infrared measurement of a real microprocessor.<
>