Quantitative thermal characterization of microelectronic devices by using CCD-based thermoreflectance microscopy

A thermoreflectance microscopy (TRM) system has emerged as a non-destructive and non-contact tool for a high resolution thermal imaging technique for micro-scale electronic and optoelectronic devices. Quantitative imaging of the temperature distribution is necessary for elaborate thermal characterization under operating conditions, such as thermal profiling and performance and reliability analysis. We introduce here a straightforward TRM system to perform quantitative thermal characterization of microelectronics devices. The quantitative imaging of the surface temperature distribution of a polysilicon micro-resistor is obtained by a lock-in measurement technique and calibration process in the conventional CCD-based widefield microscope. To confirm the quantitative thermal measurement, the measured thermal information is compared to that obtained with an infrared thermography (IRT) system. In addition to quantitative surface temperature distribution, the sub-micron defects on microelectronic devices can be clearly distinguished from the thermoreflectance images, which are hardly perceptible with a conventional widefield microscopy system. The thermal resolution of the proposed TRM system is experimentally determined by measuring standard deviation values of thermoreflectance data with respect to the iteration number. The spatial and thermal resolutions of our system are measured ~670 nm and ~13 mK, respectively. We believe that quantitative thermal imaging in the TRM system can be used for improvement of microelectronic devices and integrated circuit (IC) designs.