Fast transient electro-thermal simulation of on-chip interconnects in the presence of ESD pulses

An efficient transient electro-thermal simulation of on-chip interconnects under electrostatic discharge (ESD) stress is carried out with the alternating-direction-implicit (ADI) method. Both temperature-dependence of electrical resistivity and Joule heating effect are taking into account in the modeling. With the ADI technique, the heat conduction equations in the matrix form are derived at three sub-time steps, which can be calculated with linear computational complexity and memory requirement. The accuracy and high-efficiency of the proposed method are demonstrated by the numerical examples.