Surface-Temperature Measurement and Submicron Defect Isolation for Microelectronic Devices Using Thermoreflectance Microscopy

Thermal analysis of small defects becomes essential for understanding the influence of hotspots, which affect the device performance, such as the operating speed and reliability. In this paper, we demonstrate a CCD-based thermoreflectance microscopy (TRM) system as a noncontact thermal analysis technique especially for submicron defects on microelectronic devices. By employing a lock-in detection technique and temperature calibration process, the surface temperature distribution of a polysilicon microresistor and submicron defects that are not distinguishable in conventional optical microscope images can be quantitatively measured with high thermal (up to 13 mK) and spatial (670 nm) resolution. In addition, the accuracy of quantitative temperature measurement and small defect isolation by the TRM system is compared with that obtained from an infrared thermography (IRT) system.