Venkatesh Avula won the Best Overall Poster Award at ITherm 2021 (the IEEE Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems). The conference was held June 1-4 in a virtual format. 

Avula is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). The title of his award-winning poster was “Augmented finite element method (AFEM) for the linear steady-state thermal and thermomechanical analysis of heterogeneous integration architectures.”

Continuous size reduction of transistors, while achieving higher performance, has been the hallmark of electronic product evolution. With transistor scaling starting to slow down, heterogeneous integration at the package level has become a necessity to continue the trend. Heterogeneous integration involves miscellaneous components integrated onto the same package, which results in both compact system and high-performance. The benefits, however, come at the cost of multi-physics design challenges, such as thermomechanical and electrical reliability.  In ascertaining the reliability of a package, traditional modeling methods rely on time-stepping procedures and suffer from long computation times. In Avula’s paper, a novel frequency domain-based methodology for linear thermal and thermomechanical analysis is presented. The method exploits the periodic nature of loading conditions often used for reliability analysis and is shown to be 200x faster, as compared to current methods.

In addition to this paper being selected for the Best Overall Poster Award at ITherm 2021, it also received the Best Paper Runner-up and Best Poster awards in the mechanics and reliability track at the conference. Avula’s coauthors on the poster are his advisors – Madhavan Swaminathan, who holds the John Pippin Chair in Microsystems Packaging and Electromagnetics in ECE, and Vanessa Smet and Yogendra Joshi, both faculty members in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Smet is an assistant professor and Joshi is the John M. McKenney and Warren D. Shiver Distinguished Chair.