Future Microsystems Exploration Announcement: Thermal Modeling of Nanoscale Transistors (Thermonat)

Background
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) aims to develop high-risk, high-reward technologies for revolutionary advances in materials, devices, and systems, continuing DARPA's mission of creating and preventing strategic surprise.

The Microsystems Exploration program facilitates rapid responses with smaller, targeted investments.

Work Details
The contract involves developing an accurate and computationally efficient multi-scale thermal modeling framework for deeply-scaled emerging transistors used in very large-scale integration. The framework will operate under both steady-state and transient modes (0.1 ns to 1 ns timescales) and target prediction uncertainty of 1°C in maximum temperature with over 1000X reduction in computational effort compared to the current state-of-the-art.

It aims to ensure thermal properties and interfacial thermal resistances predicted by the framework are within 1% of atomistic approaches.