Modeling and Inverse Identification of Interfacial Heat Conduction in Finite Layer and Semi-Infinite Substrate Systems via a Physics-Guided Neural Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces HeatTransFormer, a physics-guided Transformer model that accurately simulates and identifies thermal properties in complex interface-dominated heat transfer systems, overcoming limitations of traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Transformer-based framework with physics-guided sampling and Laplace-inspired activation for stable, accurate modeling and inverse identification in thermal interface problems.

Findings

HeatTransFormer accurately models temperature fields across interfaces.

The inverse strategy reliably identifies thermal properties from measurements.

The approach outperforms conventional PINNs in stability and physical consistency.

Abstract

Heat transfer in semiconductor devices is dominated by chip and substrate assemblies, where heat generated within a finite chip layer dissipates into a semi-infinite substrate with much higher thermophysical properties. This mismatch produces steep interfacial temperature gradients, making the transient thermal response highly sensitive to the interface. Conventional numerical solvers require excessive discretization to resolve these dynamics, while physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) often exhibit unstable convergence and loss of physical consistency near the material interface. To address these challenges, we introduce HeatTransFormer, a physics-guided Transformer architecture for interface-dominated diffusion problems. The framework integrates physically informed spatiotemporal sampling, a Laplace-based activation emulating analytical diffusion solutions, and a mask-free attention mechanism supporting bidirectional spatiotemporal coupling. These components enable the model to resolve steep gradients, maintain physical consistency, and remain stable where PINNs typically fail. HeatTransFormer produces coherent temperature fields across the interface when applied to a finite layer and semi-infinite substrate configuration. Coupled with a physics-constrained inverse strategy, it further enables reliable identification of three unknown thermal properties simultaneously using only external measurements. Overall, this work demonstrates that physics-guided Transformer architectures provide a unified framework for forward and inverse modeling in interface-dominated thermal systems.