This paper presents NanoHeat, a multi-resolution full-chip dynamic integrated circuit (IC) thermal analysis solution, that is accurate down to the scale of individual gates and transistors. NanoHeat unifies nanoscale and macroscale dynamic thermal physics models, for accurate characterization of heat transport from the gate and transistor level up to the chip-package level. A non-homogeneous Arnoldi-based analysis method is proposed for accurate and fast dynamic thermal analysis through a unified adaptive spatial-temporal refinement process. NanoHeat is capable of covering the complete spatial and temporal modeling spectrum of IC thermal analysis. The accuracy and efficiency of NanoHeat are evaluated, and NanoHeat has been applied to a large industry design. The importance of considering fine-grain temperature information is illustrated by using NanoHeat to estimate temperature-dependent negative-bias-temperature-instability (NBTI) effects. NanoHeat has been implemented and publicly released for free academic and personal use.

Emerging electric-drive vehicles demonstrate the potential for significant reduction of petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Existing electric-drive vehicles typi- cally include a battery system consisting of thousands of Lithium-ion battery cells. Therefore, large-scale battery-system modeling and analysis is essential for battery system performance analysis, next-generation battery system design, and transportation electrification.

Thermal analysis has long been essential for designing reliable high-performance cost-effective integrated circuits (ICs). Increasing power densities are making this problem more important. Characterizing the thermal profile of an IC quickly enough to allow feedback on the thermal effects of tentative design changes is a daunting problem, and its complexity is increasing. The move to nanometer-scale fabrication processes is increasing the importance of thermal phenomena such as ballistic phonon transport. The accurate thermal analysis of nanometer-scale ICs containing hundreds of millions of devices requires characterization of heat transport across multiple length scales. These scales range from the nanometer scale (device-level impact) to the centimeter scale (cooling package impact). Existing chip-package thermal analysis methods based on classical Fourier heat transfer cannot capture nanometer-scale thermal effects. However, accurate device-level modeling techniques, such as molecular dynamics methods, are far too slow for use in full-chip IC thermal analysis. In this paper, we propose and develop ThermalScope, a multiscale thermal analysis method for nanometer-scale IC design. It unifies microscopic and macroscopic thermal modeling methods, i.e., the Boltzmann transport equation and Fourier modeling methods. Moreover, it supports adaptive multiresolution modeling. Together, these ideas enable the efficient and accurate characterization of nanometer-scale heat transport as well as the chip-package-level heat flow. ThermalScope is designed for full-chip thermal analysis of billion-transistor nanometer-scale IC designs, with accuracy at the scale of individual devices. ThermalScope enables the accurate characterization of various temperature-related effects, such as temperature-dependent leakage power and temperature-timing dependences. ThermalScope has been implemented in software and used for the full-chip thermal analysis and temperature-dependent leakage analysis of an IC design with more than 150 million transistors. ThermalScope will be publicly released for free academic and personal use.

Thermal analysis has long been essential for designing reliable, high-performance, cost-effective integrated circuits (ICs). Increasing power densities are making this problem more important. Characterizing the thermal profile of an IC quickly enough to allow feedback on the thermal effects of tentative design changes is a daunting problem, and its complexity is increasing. The move to nanoscale fabrication processes is increasing the importance of quantum thermal phenomena such as ballistic phonon transport. Accurate thermal analysis of nanoscale ICs containing hundreds of millions of devices requires characterization of thermal effects on length scales that vary by several orders of magnitude, from nanoscale quantum thermal effects to centimeter-scale cooling package impact. Existing chip.package thermal analysis methods based on classical Fourier heat transfer cannot capture nanoscale quantum thermal effects. However, accurate device-level modeling techniques, such as molecular dynamics methods, are far too slow for use in full-chip IC thermal analysis. In this work, we propose and develop ThermalScope, a multi-scale thermal analysis method for nanoscale IC design. It unifies microscopic and macroscopic thermal physics modeling methods, i.e., the Fourier and Boltzmann transport modeling methods. Moreover, it supports adaptive multi-resolution modeling. Together, these ideas enable efficient and accurate characterization of nanoscale quantum heat transport as well as chip.package level heat flow. ThermalScope is designed for full-chip thermal analysis of billion-transistor nanoscale IC designs, with accuracy at the scale of individual devices. ThermalScope enables accurate characterization of temperature-related effects, such as variation in leakage power and delay. ThermalScope has been implemented in software and used for full-chip thermal analysis and temperature-dependent leakage analysis of an IC design with more than 150 million transistors. It will be publicly released for free academic and personal use.