In this blog, we provide an overview of thermal boundary resistance, why understanding it is critical when engineering semiconductor devices, and some critical challenges for interfacial thermal metrology. What is thermal boundary resistance? Thermal boundary resistance is simply a measure of resistance to heat flow at the interface between two materials. It is also commonly...
A summary of some of the biggest trends for the semiconductor industry heading into 2023.
A summary of some of the biggest trends for the semiconductor industry heading into 2023.
Traditional thermal metrology techniques cannot be relied upon to generate reliable thermal resistance data for thin film materials.
Traditional thermal metrology techniques cannot be relied upon to generate reliable thermal resistance data for thin film materials.
Our world runs on semiconductors, and chip manufacturers are always looking for improvements that can help deliver higher yield and lower costs in the fabrication process. In this blog, we examine the semiconductor testing process, how it works, and why it’s particularly critical for this industry.
SSTR measurements on ALD grown ultrathin film amorphous gate dielectrics (compared to TDTR) (source).
SSTR measurements of AlN crystalline thin films.2 SSTR data (temperature rise vs. power) on right for AlN film and silicon wafer control.
| Literature Value | TPS Measurement | SSTR-F Measurement | |
| Pyroceram 9606 | 4.07 +/- .26 | 3.95 | 3.95 +/- 0.2 |
| HPFS 7980 | 1.38 | 1.39 | 1.39 +/- 0.09 |
20 SSTR-F measurements at same spot
20 SSTR-F measurements at random spots
SSTR-F data on 4 different 200 nm dielectric films on silicon with thermal conductivity ranging from ~0.35 W/m/K up to 1.8 W/m/K. SSTR-F allows for easy, rapid and automated identification of different temperature rises based on the thermal conductivity of the different films.