HotSpot—A Chip and Package Compact Thermal Modeling Methodology for VLSI Design

To deal with the challenges of managing the ever-increasing power densities and temperatures of VLSI systems, thermal models have become more and more important for performing thermal analysis during design time. Due to their lumped thermal R-C network nature, compact thermal models are simple and efficient for thermal analysis in VLSI design, especially during early design stages, where detailed layout information is not available. Additionally, temperature predictions from compact thermal models can also be utilized to develop architecture-level run-time thermal management techniques. However, existing compact thermal modeling approaches have a number of limitations, such as not providing detailed temperature distributions, or using unrealistic assumptions for package modeling, or being restricted to particular packages, or being not parameterizable.