Parameterized Physical Compact Thermal Modeling

This paper presents a compact thermal modeling approach, which is fully parameterized according to design geometries and material physical properties. While most compact modeling approaches facilitate thermal characterization of existing package designs, our method is better suited for preliminary exploration of the design space at both the silicon level and the package level. We show that our modeling method achieves reasonable boundary condition independence (BCI) by comparing an example compact thermal model with a BCI model for a benchmark BGA single-chip package under the same standard set of boundary conditions. In essence, the presented compact thermal modeling method can act as a convenient medium for enhanced interactions and collaborations among designers at the package, circuit and computer architecture levels, leading to efficient early evaluations of different thermally-related design trade-offs at all the above levels of abstraction before the actual detailed design is available. The presented modeling method can be easily extended to model emerging packaging schemes such as stacked chip-scale packaging (SCP) and 3-D integration.