Abstract
Due to the temperature-dependent resistivity of power distribution network (PDN) interconnects, a wiser and necessary strategy is to proceed the electrical-thermal cosimulation in order to include the thermal effects caused by Joule heating. As a natural domain decomposition method (DDM), in this article, a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method is proposed to facilitate the steady-state electrical and thermal coanalysis. With the intention to avoid solving a globally coupled steady-state matrix system equations resulted from 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 3-D PDNs is validated by several representative examples.