Dynamic Compact Thermal Models Used for Electronic Design: A Review of Recent Progress

Both reliability and performance of electronic systems can be seriously affected by dynamic thermal and electro-thermal effects that take place at the device, chip, package, board and system levels. The marked trend towards miniaturization down to the nano-scale, increases problem complexity due to the large number of devices and multiplicity of physical effects involved. It accentuates also the importance of thermal effects. To deal with such complicated systems, design and analysis heavily rely on compact models. Recent advances have been made to extend the relatively more mature knowledge of static compact thermal models to the dynamic case. Although the theory of dynamic compact models is far from being complete, the wealth of methods proposed has deserved a review highlighting advances made and proposing new axis of research, which is the purpose of this paper.