A Multiscale Workflow for Thermal Analysis of 3DI Chip Stacks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multiscale finite-element methodology for fast, accurate thermal analysis of 3D chip stacks, capturing detailed phenomena in complex, multi-material systems for improved thermal management.

Contribution

The paper presents a hierarchical multiscale FEM approach that automates the construction of RVE models for thermal homogenization in 3D integrated circuit stacks.

Findings

Enables die-scale thermal simulations with detailed BEOL features.

Uses automated RVE construction from industry layout files.

Achieves efficient and accurate thermal analysis for complex chip stacks.

Abstract

Thermally aware design of 2.5D and 3D advanced packaging systems will require fast, accurate, and powerful thermal analysis of chiplets, stacks, and packages. These systems contain multiple materials with non-linear heat transfer properties and geometric feature sizes that span many orders of magnitude. The smallest heterostructures in the front and back ends of the line present significant thermal modeling and analysis challenges in isolation. Replicated millions or billions of times in a chiplet stack, these structures present a near insurmountable hurdle to meeting the speed and accuracy needed of analysis in the design process. Additionally, establishing precise parameter values for the materials in these systems, when size and temperature dependencies create significant deviations from bulk properties, further complicates the problem. To address these issues, we have developed a multiscale methodology that advances the current state of the field by enabling die-scale simulations that capture phenomena arising from the structural details of the BEOL metallization stack. Taking advantage of the large length-scale separation between the BEOL features and the die-level structures, we employ a hierarchical, multiscale, finite-element approach. This hierarchical method uses a standard finite element method (FEM) formulation on a die or package scale, using computational homogenization to obtain effective thermal conductivities in the BEOL. Referring to industry-standard layout and design files, we construct and solve a locally appropriate subscale FEM problem in a representative volume element (RVE) at every quadrature point in the macroscale FEM problem. To accomplish this, RVE models are automatically constructed, meshed, and used to compute homogenized, anisotropic, thermal conductivities from the relevant GDSII or OASIS.