Abstract: A system and method to fully characterize the thermal behavior of complex 3D submicron electronic devices. The system replaces and/or supplements laser-based surface temperature scanning with a CCD camera-based approach. A CCD camera records multiple points of light energy reflected from an integrated circuit to obtain a temperature measurement. The system is used to non-invasively measure with submicron resolution the 2D surface temperature field of an activated device. The measured 2D temperature field is used as input for an ultra-fast inverse computational solver. The system couples measured results and computations in a novel approach, making it possible to extract geometric and thermal features of a device, and to obtain critically needed temperature distributions over the entire 3D volume of that device, including regions that are physically or optically inaccessible. The obtained distributions reflect the real, and not merely theoretical, physical construction and thermal behavior of that device.

Abstract: A system and method to fully characterize the thermal behavior of complex 3D submicron electronic devices. The system replaces and/or supplements laser-based surface temperature scanning with a CCD camera-based approach. A CCD camera records multiple points of light energy reflected from an integrated circuit to obtain a static temperature measurement. The system is used to non-invasively measure with submicron resolution the 2D surface temperature field of an activated device. A CW laser illuminates a single point on the surface of an active device and a photodetector records the reflected light energy to obtain a transient temperature measurement. The measured 2D temperature field is used as input for an ultra-fast inverse computational solution to fully characterize the thermal behavior of the complex 3D device. The system extracts geometric features of a known device, assessing the system's ability to combine measured results and computations to fully characterize complex 3D electronic devices.

Abstract: A system (2) predicts the behavior of a component using refinements in both space and time. The system (2) includes a steady-state engine (14) that generates a steady-state stencil (16) that defines successively refined meshes (58, 60, 90, 118, 122) in space. A transient engine (18) adopts the spatial framework of the steady-state stencil (16) to predict the behavior of the component over time. The transient engine (18) may adjust a time interval (356) to refine the predictions in time.