Typical Applications

Abstract

Some applications of Lock-in Thermography for the investigation of a thermally thin sample (solar cell) and a thermally thick one (IC) were already presented in the examples given in Chap.5In the following section we will present some more applications, showing the universal applicability of this technique to different fields of functional diagnostics of electronic components. Here we have restricted ourselves to themost prominent application fields of lock-in thermography in electronic device testing, which are failure analysis in integrated circuits and testing of solar cells, modules, and materials. At the beginning of each section, the physical problem to be solved will briefly be introduced. Of course, also this can only be a small survey of the possibilities of lock-in thermography in this field. Not considered here will be e.g. the application to gate oxide integrity (GOI) defects [103, 104], to bonded wafers [105, 108], as well as the applications belonging to the fields of non-destructive testing (NDT, see [2]) and of biology and medicine (see, e.g., [75]). In Sect. 6.1 some more investigations of integrated circuits (ICs) will be described, since this may become one of the most promising applications of lock-in thermography in future. Especially, we will present the application of a solid immersion lens (SIL), and an application of a more sophisticated triggering mode of imaging sites of a definite logical response of an IC, which was mentioned in Sect. 2.3.Moreover, we present an example of a lock-in thermography investigation from the back-side on an encapsulated chip “through the die”.