CCD thermoreflectance for thermal characterization of optoelectronic devices

The impact of heating on electronic and optoelectronic devices is becoming increasingly important as devices scale to smaller sizes, thus becoming faster and more powerful. High temperature not only reduces most performance metrics, but also decreases device lifetime and impairs its reliability. In order to study and understand these problems, an important step is to measure temperature at small size scales with high spatial and temperature resolution. The monitoring of the facet/surface temperature is very useful for the study of the thermal processes and failure mechanisms, and also for increasing reliability and performance of electronic and optoelectronic devices. The thermal characterization of such devices provides a mode for comparing different packages, geometries and device designs. This paper describes the development of the instrumentation for accurate evaluation of the thermal characteristics of optoelectronic and electronic devices. Here we show how CCD-based thermoreflectance (Charged Coupled Device Thermoreflectance- CCD TR) temperature measurement can be successfully applied to the thermal characterisation of such devices. The capabilities of the CCD TR are compared with the standard thermoreflectance spectroscopy and with Raman spectroscopy.