Electro-Thermal Analysis of Integrated Circuits Using Coupling of SPICE and COMSOL

This work describes a method for the analysis of electro-thermal interactions in integrated circuits. A circuit simulator Spectre SPICE and the thermal simulator are coupled to calculate the temperature during the analysis. This method is applied to perform electro-thermal analysis of a chain of CMOS inverters predicting the temperature of the circuit and the power dissipated associated with it. The schematic of the chain of CMOS inverters is designed in Spectre SPICE from the UMC 180 nm technology library. The circuit simulation is done and the power dissipation of the chain of 802 inverters is calculated. This power dissipation is used as a heat source in the thermal model using COMSOL Multiphysics to calculate the temperature distribution of the 3D model with good accuracy. The simulation results show an increased in temperature of the circuit over time when compared to the model with constant temperature.