The MTA: An Advanced and Versatile Thermal Simulator for Integrated Systems

Fast and accurate thermal analysis is crucial for determining the propagation of heat and tracking the formation of hotspots in integrated circuits (ICs). Existing academic thermal analysis tools primarily use compact models to accelerate thermal simulations but are limited to linear problems on relatively simple circuit geometries. The Manchester Thermal Analyzer (MTA) is a comprehensive tool that allows for fast and highly accurate linear and nonlinear thermal simulations of complex physical structures including the IC, the package, and the heatsink. The MTA is targeted for 2.5/3-D IC designs but also handles standard planar ICs. The MTA discretizes the heat equation in space using the finite element method and performs the time integration with unconditionally stable implicit time stepping methods. To improve the computational efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, the MTA features adaptive spatiotemporal refinement. The large-scale linear systems that arise during the simulation are solved with fast preconditioned Krylov subspace methods. The MTA supports thermal analysis of realistic integrated systems and surpasses the computational capabilities and performance of existing academic thermal simulators. For example, the simulation of a processor in a package attached to a heat sink, modeled by a computational grid consisting of over 3 million nodes, takes less than 3 min. The MTA is fully parallel and publicly available.
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