Electrical-Thermal Co-Simulation for DC IR-Drop Analysis of Large-Scale Power Delivery

For accurate DC IR-drop analysis of integrated circuits, electrical-thermal co-simulation is necessary to consider the effect of Joule heating. A suitable numerical method for this co-simulation is the finite element method (FEM) because of its capabilities in modeling complex geometries and materials. To deal with large-scale problems, a domain decomposition scheme is applied to the FEM to enable simulation with multiple processors in parallel and achieve significant reduction in computation time.