Thermal Issues in Deep Sub-Micron FDSOI Circuits

Self-heating effects became more prominent with the introduction of the modern devices like FDSOI and low thermal conductivity materials such as SiO2. Consequently, the design of high speed digital circuits which are the time-critical blocks of high performance processors started to be limited mainly by thermal issues. For observing the thermal behaviour of FDSOI structure on circuit level, a 64-bit Kogge-Stone parallel prefix adder is designed and implemented in 40nm bulk CMOS technology and thermal model of the circuit is extracted and simulated according to FDSOI design parameters. The implemented adder circuit has a critical path delay of 148ps under 900 mV power supply voltage with a power consumption of 12mW. The temperature profile of the designed circuit is extracted with thermal simulations and the peak temperature locations are examined in detail. The hot spot locations and their temperature values are correlated with the power density. It is shown that self-heating of high power density devices has a significant influence on the peak temperature of a design. Finally, a simple design solution is proposed which can significantly decrease the peak temperature.