Spectral microthermography for component discrimination and hot spot identification in integrated circuits

We demonstrate an efficient and versatile spectral microthermography technique for identifying hot and cold spots in the active layer of a biased integrated circuit. Hot (cold) spots are regions where heat accumulates more rapidly (slowly) than the average rate of the entire active layer. Knowledge of the hot and cold spot locations is crucial in assessing the thermal integrity of a layer structure because hot spots are locations were defects are more likely to develop. The active layer is uniformly illuminated with light from a tungsten lamp and its reflectance image r(x, y) is scanned across (x-direction) the entrance slit of a grating-prism pair (GRISM) spectrometer to produce a spectral map R(lambda; x, y) where lambda is the wavelength [450