Abstract. An overview of electro-thermal modeling of microsystems is presented. We consider the most important coupling between thermal and electrical phenomena, and then focus on the industry's central concern, that of Joule heating. A description of different solution approaches for the heat transfer partial differential equation, which constitutes the central part of electro-thermal simulation, is given. We briefly review the analytical solutions and consider further the numerical approaches, which are based on spatial discretization of the thermal domain. Lastly, we describe the final level of approximation, the dynamic compact thermal modeling. We emphasize the formal model order reduction methods, because they directly follow the spatial discretization, and thus preserve the investment into the finite element modeling.

Print publication: Issue 11 (November 2005)
Received 30 May 2005, in final form 29 July 2005
Published 17 October 2005