High resolution temperature mapping of microelectronic structures using quantitative fluorescence microthermography

The impact and performance of fluorescence microthermography (FMT) are presented here. Specifications of lateral. resolution and temperature sensitivity are derived from test structure measurements. This method overcomes hot-spot localization limits of liquid crystal thermography (LCT) by improving both the lateral and the thermal resolution and by delivering temperature profiles instead of a binary signal. Temperature mappings of 6 mK sensitivity and a lateral resolution of the wafer prober microscope, here 0.5 μm, were obtained. The focus of this article is to demonstrate how the excellent performance of FMT can be used for routine applications of temperature mapping and hot-spot localization. In addition, we compared FMT to LCT, which is still the most widely applied hot-spot localization technique.