As car, space, medical and industrial sectors such as the complex chips, plus a circuit board or system single chip (SoC) in order to meet the market demand and add more features, let chip heat effect has become a problem in the semiconductor and system design.

According to Semiconductor Engineering reports, DfR Solutions, senior engineer, points out that as chips and circuit board more and more small, make thermal dissipation is more serious. Ansys vice general pointed out that the heat will bring a bunch of unpredictable change, letting industry must be from the chip packaging or system level assessment of the severity of the thermal shock, FinFET must deal with local overheating problems in the process, and after entering 10 or 7 nanometer degree is more serious.

As early as in 2001, the then long Pat Gelsinger Intel (Intel) technology and predict the future 10 years, chip to improve the energy density is must try to solve the problem. In the SoC of high density packaging, not all of the waste heat can be spread out.

Mentor Graphics (Mentor Graphics) marketing manager pointed out that in car entertainment systems, for example, the dashboard will produce heat and not easy to spread out, then may let the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) unstable and therefore thermal management must be evaluated from the perspective of closer to the silicon.

As for evaluation in advance where and when to appear thermal dissipation, it must rely on a variety of tools, experience with luck. And as average temperature on the grain size is not, why to calculate heat affect stability and more difficult, at present all EDA vendors have joint in an attempt to solve the problem.

Synopsys engineer pointed out that have extremely accurate and abundant information model appears more important, but also brings certain pressure electronic design automation (EDA) the manufacturer. Evolution (Cadence) said computer, traditionally analysis tools for package temperature mostly, but after 10 nm FinFET, local considerations must be diverted from the circuit board to the transistors.

Sonics technology officer also points out that the leakage current problems remain, and semiconductor physics is unchanged. When the outside world is focused on the use of pulse to control the power consumption, but in fact the pulse tree (clock tree), there are still a lot of power to produce. Another must face the challenge of dynamic power management.

Wingard argues that the solution is to improve the efficiency of pulse control, in addition, advanced or individual grain packaging is one of the feasible way. Tessera President pointed out that the main problems involved in heat dissipation, which is the thickness of the grain. Because of reduced thickness can decrease the resistance to let more heat out. The company has started to develop stacked DRAM in different ways, make part of DRAM can open more air to enter.

In addition, companies such as Kilopass in development can heat the one-time programmable (OTP) memory, to replace other kinds of nonvolatile memory. The company vice President pointed out that the embedded flash memory can support to 85 degrees Celsius, but OTP can support to 125 degrees.

The industry also began to research how to solve the problem of thermal effect from the start. Mentor graphics, points out that thermal silicon perforation (TSV) is one of the research direction, in addition, the etching liquid flow at the bottom of the grain (liquid channels) is the research object and introduce new thermal interface materials.

IROC Technologies President pointed out that the high temperature and high voltage will be increased latch effect (latch - up) risk, caused a serious problem of stability, another temperature effects of enthusiasm is the actual son (thermal neutron) flux. DfR Solutions that heat is causing flash memory gradually slide a bit (bit slip) the reason of the problem and data preservation.

Now with the Internet of things (IoT) development, these problems will be more complex, thermal dissipation has gradually become a part of the design shall consider, and power consumption, structure, process and packaging are closely related.