Eecient Transient Electrothermal Simulation of Cmos Vlsi Circuits under Electrical Overstress

Overstress Tong Li Ching-Han Tsai Sung-Mo (Steve) Kang Dept. of Computer Science Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering Coordinated Science Laboratory Coordinated Science Laboratory Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Abstract Accurate simulation of transient device thermal behavior is essential to predict CMOS VLSI circuit failures under electrical overstress (EOS). In this paper, we present an e cient transient electrothermal simulator that is built upon a SPICE-like engine. The transient device temperature is estimated by the convolution of the device power dissipation and its thermal impulse response which can be derived an analytical solution of the heat di usion equation. New fast thermal simulation techniques are proposed including a regionwise-exponential (RWE) approximation of thermal impulse response and recursive convolution scheme. The recursive convolution provides a signi cant performance improvement over the numerical convolution by orders of magnitude, making it computationally feasible to simulate CMOS circuits with many devices.