Transient Multiscale Workflow for Thermal Analysis of 3DHI Chip Stack

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel transient thermal workflow for 3D heterogeneous chip stacks that automatically extracts and homogenizes thermal properties from design files, enabling accurate hot-spot prediction in complex packages.

Contribution

It introduces a workflow based on Bloomfield et al. 2025 that generates transient thermal property maps accounting for heterogeneity in BEOL structures.

Findings

Generated property maps for a 1mm x 1mm SoC model with different grid resolutions.

Provided expressions for transient effective conductivity.

Demonstrated the impact of transient effects on a single RVE.

Abstract

Modern package designs make use of technologies such as backside power delivery (BSPD) and 3D stacked chiplets that require accounting for the heterogeneity in back end of the line (BEOL) structures in hot-spot prediction. Multiscale homogenization strategies have been demonstrated to be effective for steady-state simulations, however accurate 3D transient simulations that include BEOL structures remain an open challenge. In this work, we demonstrate a transient thermal workflow that accounts for the 3D heterogeneous structures in the BEOL for problems with strong- and weak- temporal scale separation under the assumption of temperature independent constitutive properties. Our workflow, based on Bloomfield et. al. 2025, automatically extracts, meshes, and homogenizes thermal properties from GDSII and OASIS files to construct thermal property maps. Property maps (heat capacity and conductivity) have been generated for a 1 mm by 1 mm SoC-style model die that was constructed with LibreLane for 100 by 100 grids with 5 micron by 5 micron representative volume elements (RVEs), and 50 by 50 grids with 10 micron by 10 micron RVEs. The expressions for a transient effective conductivity are provided and a demonstration of the impact of the transient effects are provided for a single RVE. Finally, transient conductivity maps have been provided for a time integration timestep of dt=0.001.