DC IR-Drop Analysis of Multilayered Power Distribution Network by Discontinuous Galerkin Method with Thermal Effects Incorporated

Abstract

Due to the temperature dependent resistivity of power delivery network (PDN) interconnects, a wiser and necessary strategy is to proceed the electrical-thermal co-simulation in order to include the thermal effects caused by Joule Heating. As a natural domain decomposition method (DDM), in this work, a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method is proposed to facilitate the steady-state electrical and thermal co-analysis. With the intention to avoid solving a globally coupled steady-state matrix system equations resulted by the implicit numerical flux in DG, the block Thomas method is deployed to solve the entire domain in a subdomain by subdomain scheme. As a direct solver, the block Thomas method is free of convergence problem frequently occurring in iterative methods such as block Gauss-Seidel method. The capability of the proposed DG method in handling multiscale and complex 3D PDNs is validated by several representative examples.