Essential Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

Thermal Design Tools

Larry:

Not the wires, usually, but hot spots are a problem area, particularly for large chips and those used in portable products. Power is turned into heat when electrical current passes through a resistance. We can generate less power (and heat) by reducing the IC voltage and minimizing the current. For many digital products, power usage occurs only when the transistors switch. (They use almost no power when not switching. See Appendix A.) The faster they switch, the more power they use, and the more heat they generate. High-speed chips generate a lot of heat, unevenly distributed across the chip. Transistor characteristics such as noise margin vary with temperature. Therefore, signals between different temperature logic ...