MONSTR: A Complete Thermal Simulator of Electronic Systems

This paper presents a new approach to 3-dimensional thermal simulation of arbitrary electronic systems. This approach is based on the combination of numerical (finite elements and finite differences) and analytical (Fourier series) techniques which are very general and extremely efficient. Complex electronic systems (monolithic IC's, multichip modules, including their packaging) can be analyzed in minutes on PC's to produce a detailed temperature distributions within the system structure. The software system, MONSTR, has been developed and applied to several industrial examples. The results of this analysis are directly entered to the circuit simulator, HSPICE, as the actual temperature for each circuit element and thus an integrated electro-thermal simulation is performed.