PRODUCTS

Overview HeatWave Modeling Temperature
“Managing heat is important in high-power design. The thermal map of a circuit can be used as a floorplanning tool to reduce temperature deltas in sensitive areas of the design; this may translate to greater efficiency. After successive simulation runs with HeatWave, a designer can look at the thermal map and make decisions about how the heat producing elements can be placed.”

David Schwan
Engineering Manager, CAD & Layout, Multi-Market Products Group, RF Micro Devices

HeatWave

HeatWave™ is an IC thermal simulator for chips, and stacked-die SiP. It computes the full-chip temperature profile at the spatial resolution of your devices and interconnect, and annotates this data into your circuit simulator, making your simulation results temperature-accurate. Because the geometric features of power sources and heat conduction paths inside a chip are at the submicron scale, the thermal modeling and numerical solution techniques have to be commensurate with such feature sizes. The simulation results are 3-dimensional temperature profiles with the necessary resolution and accuracy.

HeatWave OpAmp Instance Temperature Waveforms

Improving Design Quality

HeatWave reveals opportunities to neutralize adverse temperature effects, by revealing hotspots and excessive temperature variations in mixed-signal designs. It provides commands to automatically monitor temperature values and variations, to help detect thermal hazards in the design.

Improving Chip Quality

HeatWave enhances your ability to detect reliability and wear-out issues, by providing nanoscale temperatures within the chip, over time.

Smooth, Painless Data Flow

HeatWave is built to fit into the standard EDA ecosystem and to make use of existing IC design data. It reads power source geometries, layout and technology file data, and package data as inputs. Its integration with the analog design flow automates device-level CAD data exchange, enabling you to simulate full-chip temperature, without laborious data preparation.

HeatWave Block Diagram

The output includes a full-chip temperature profile, provided as a graphically viewable 3-D database, and a temperature-annotated netlist for simulation. This enables your simulator to determine the impact of temperature on your circuit’s performance and reliability.

3D Visualization Capability

HeatWave can be run in interactive GUI mode, allowing the user to navigate in 3 dimensions throughout the chip and to visually inspect the temperatures on the devices, the metal layers, and other design objects.

HeatWave can also be run from a script, enabling integration of results into other analysis tools.

HeatWave Versions

HeatWave is also available in three special versions:
  • HeatWave SS Analog: Steady state analysis for analog designers (formerly: Gradient CircuitFire™)
  • HeatWave SS SoC: Steady state analysis for system on chip designers (formerly: Gradient FireBolt™)
  • HeatWave 3DIC: Steady state analysis for 3DIC