The transient thermoreflectance (TTR) method consists of measuring changes in the reflectivity of a material (thin film) under pulsed laser heating, and relating these changes to the corresponding surface temperature variations. Analytical solutions of the diffusion problem are then used to determine the thermal conductivity of the material following an iterative matching process between the solutions and the experimental results. Analytical solutions are attainable either when the material absorbs the laser energy volumetrically or when the material absorbs the laser energy at the surface. Either solution allows for the determination of only one thermal property (thermal conductivity or diffusivity), with the other one assumed to be known. A new, single, analytical solution to the transient diffusion equation with simultaneous surface and volumetric heating, found using fractional calculus, is presented in a semi-derivative form. This complete solution provides the means to determine the two thermal properties of the material (thermal conductivity and diffusivity) concomitantly. In this preliminary study, the solution component for surface heating is validated by comparison with experimental data for a gold sample using the classical thermoreflectance method. Further results, for surface and volumetric heating, are obtained and analyzed considering a GaAs sample.

This work presents a demonstration of the applicability and efficacy of an experimental system capable of noninvasively and nondestructively scanning the transient surface temperature of pulsed microelectronic devices with submicron spatial and sub-microsecond temporal resolutions. The article describes the features of the experimental setup, provides details of the calibration process used to map the changes in the measured surface reflectivity to absolute temperature values, and explains the data acquisition procedure used to measure the transient temperature over a given active region. This thermoreflectance thermometry system is shown to be particularly suited for directly measuring the surface temperature field of devices undergoing the fast transients that are typical of next generation microelectronic devices. To illustrate the experimental approach, both quasisteady and transient temperature measurement results are presented for standard MOSFET devices.

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