In this paper, an efficient thermal analysis method is presented for large scale compound semiconductor integrated circuits based on a heterojunction bipolar transistor with considering the change of thermal conductivity with temperature. The infl uence caused by the thermal conductivity can be equivalent to the increment of the local temperature surrounding the individual device. The junction temperature for each device can be efficiently calculated by the combination of the semi-analytic temperature distribution function and the iteration of local temperature with high accuracy, providing a temperature distribution for a full chip. Applying this method to the InP frequency divider chip and the GaAs analog to digital converter chip, the computational results well agree with the results from the simulator COMSOL and the infrared thermal imager respectively. The proposed method can also be applied to thermal analysis in various kinds of semiconductor integrated circuits.