Non-Contact Surface Temperature Measurements Coupled with Ultrafast Real-Time Computation

This work presents the next step following a previous effort (Raad et al., 2006) toward creating a coupled experimental-computational technique devised for the full characterization of the thermal behavior of complex three-dimensional active submicron electronic devices. A newly developed CCD based thermoreflectance thermography (TRTG) system is used to measure the 2D surface temperature field of an activated device, non-invasively, with submicron spatial resolution. Then, the geometry and material thermal properties of the device are used to construct the corresponding numerical model. The measured temperature distribution field is then used as input for an ultrafast inverse computational technique to fully characterize the thermal behavior of three multilayered devices. For the purposes of this investigation, micro-heater devices were constructed, activated, and measured with the TRTG approach. The coupled system was used to extract key geometric properties of the micro-heaters. In this work, two parameters were chosen for optimization; namely, the thickness of bottom oxide and the length of the heat source of the micro-heaters. The results show that the extracted thickness compares well with the thickness measured by the use of a profiler. However, the extracted heat source length increases with the width of the micro-heater due to end effects. In the second part, the surface temperature results obtained with the coupled method are compared with those obtained from the fully independent electro-resistance thermometry approach. The results of the two methods compare very well, providing validation of the coupled experimental-computational system as well as confidence in its ability to thermally fully characterize complex 3D electronic devices.