During development of power IntegratedCircuits (IC), several iterations between the design and test/ measurement steps are performed. Computer-aided engineering significantly shortens the product development process because the numerical simulations can identify and remediate most deficiencies during the design stage. The recent IC manufacturing technologies lead to ca. 10 4 -order scale separation between transistor cell details and the device active area, resulting in very complex IC models. For the IC complexity to be overcome, advanced multi-scale analysis methods are required to perform accurate simulations in a decent time (order of hours). This paper proposes an advanced and enhanced multi-scale simulation method for the thermo-mechanical analysis of power ICs. The computational IC structure is automatically generated from a Cadence layout and partitioned into far-field and homogenized regions -the macro-model. Detailed localized micro-scale sub-models are assigned to limited portions of the homogenized region. The two-way simulated data transfer between the homogenized macro-model and the micro sub-models is one multi-scale approach novelty proposed in this paper. The method is validated on a real test chip structure presented in literature. The proposed multi-scale approach in conjunction with the two-way macro-micro data transfer lead to similar accuracy in the prediction of defect location, yet with significant simulation time -and computational resource reduction (CPU time and RAM usage reduced by almost 80% and 60% respectively) compared to the method used as reference.
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