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IC Thermal Hazards
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Today's analog and digital ICs can have very high power densities, with significant self- and mutual-heating of devices and interconnects, causing hazardous 3D temperature variations across the silicon surface and the metal layers. Without detailed and accurate temperature data, the designer must allow for thermal unknowns by increasing design margins, and re-spin the silicon in order to correct for any thermally induced circuit failures and performance degradations. The remedies are very costly. Gradient Design Automation pioneered accurate, fine-grain IC thermal analysis. CircuitFire and FireBolt, the company's software products, compute the temperatures within a die during the design process. The temperature data can provide early warnings for thermal hazards, such as hotspots and excessive temperature variations. The products fit into the standard analog and digital IC design flows, and the output can be used to help determine the thermal effects on critical aspects of IC designs, such as analog circuitry mismatch, electromigration, leakage current, switching speed, and relative timing paths.
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Visit our booth at the 45th Design Automation Conference
in Anaheim, California.
Booth # 613 Please send email to: sales@gradient-da.com to schedule a demo session.
"Gradient's FireBolt with an integrated package thermal model is helping AMD to explore chip floorplan, fab process, and design scaling options in a unified manner. We're able to achieve thermal modeling resolution down to a single via which significantly enhances our electromigration avoidance capability."
Jim Brewer,
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