Nomenclature

In this paper, we present a new technique to calculate the power dissipation profile from the IC temperature map using an analogy with image processing and restoration. In this technique, finite element analysis (FEA) is used to find the heat point spread function of the IC chip. Then, the temperature map is used as input for an efficient image restoration algorithm which locates the sources of strong power dissipation non-uniformities. Therefore, for the first time we optimally solve the inverse heat transfer problem, and estimate the IC power map without involving extensive lab experiments. Our computationally efficient and robust method, unlike some previous techniques in the literature, is applicable to virtually any experimental scenario. Simulation results on a typical commercial IC device confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method. Keywords Thermal non-uniformity, power map, temperature map, heat point spread function, image restoration, thermal management