Thermal runaway prediction based on electrothermal models in nanotechnologies

Power dissipation estimation and thermal runaway prediction has become one of hot topics since CMOS technology scales into the nanometre regime. In this paper, an equivalent thermal circuit is developed for thermal modeling of a typical package structure of integrated circuits (ICs) and a temperature-dependent power model is proposed for power dissipation estimation. It is shown that electro-thermal coupling exists in nanotechnology ICs and may induce thermal runaway problem. Based on the electrothermal models, steady-state temperature is solved from the nonlinear electrothermal equations with Newton's method. Numerical results show that the proposed method is accurate and efficient for thermal runaway prediction.