A thermoreflectance thermography system for measuring the transient surface temperature field of activated electronic devices

Abstract

This work reports on a system that can determine the thermal behavior of an activated complex microelectronic device by measuring its surface temperature field with a thermoreflectance-based system. The article describes the features of the experimental setup, provides details of the calibration process used to map the changes in the measured surface reflectivity to absolute temperature values, and explains the data acquisition procedure used to measure the transient temperature over a given active region of interest. The method is applied to determine the thermal behavior of actual MOSFET devices. First, the method is used to measure an activated MOSFET device and show that by scanning first and then switching the source and drain contacts, the two resulting steady state temperature scans are symmetrical. The method is then used to differentiate between the transient thermal behavior of identically activated devices that have been made on two different epitaxial layers, one with natural silicon and the other with isotopically-pure silicon