HotPak: A Tool For Rapid Thermal Mapping & Leakage Power Analysis of Flip-Chip Packages

In 2008 the Semiconductor Packaging group at Sun Microsystems published a technique for rapid thermal mapping of flip chip microprocessor/ASIC packages using analytical spectral superposition techniques. The primary focus of the current paper is to introduce a 100% pure Java application called HotPak, which embodies the analytical/computational engine from that paper, and to describe its multitude of features. HotPak has impressive benchmarks- on a typical laptop computer it takes less than 5 mins to do a complete thermal simulation for a microprocessor/ASIC layout with 10,000+ blocks. Since it is written in Java, it works flawlessly on Windows, Linux and MacOS. The predictions from the underlying engine have been verified experimentally via rigorous testing.