MICROELECTRONICS THERMAL DISSIPATION CHARACTERIZATION USING TRIZ

Abstract

Thermal dissipation of a microelectronic device is a topic of interest amongst the researchers because poor thermal dissipation may cause reliability problem during customer’s application. One of the factors that caused poor thermal dissipation of a device is due to the existence of air gap inside the package. Air gap blocks the heat dissipation path of the device, causing the heat to be entrapped inside the device and to the extent of becoming malfunction. Apparently, X-Ray and SAM are widely used to identify air gap within microelectronic devices. However, these methods are not capable to identify the poor thermal dissipation devices if some weaknesses inherited from wafer processes. Nevertheless, a better way to identify poor thermal dissipation devices is by using electrical measurement which has better advantages compared to X-Ray and SAM in terms of sampling size, time and effort. However, the challenge would be on ensuring the effectiveness of the electrical measurement to identify poor thermal dissipation devices. The problem on electrical measurement effectiveness is best solved by using TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) because TRIZ is a well structure approach to stimulate new idea in solving the effectiveness problem. Functional Model analysis is carried out to observe the interactions of the electrical measurement’s super system, system and sub-system. From the Functional Model and Cause-and-Effect analysis, the root cause for the ineffectiveness of the measurement was determined. Engineering Contradiction statement was formed to identify the improving and worsening parameters. By referring to the Contradiction Matrix, TRIZ proposed to use Parameter Change (PC) as one of the solutions principle to increase the effectiveness of identifying poor thermal dissipation devices. Experiment and data collection confirmed that TRIZ PC principle is able to identify poor thermal dissipation in microelectronic device even though the device did not have air gaps. Such identification was not possible through traditional approaches, such as X-Ray or SAM.