Thermal testing

IC technology and design tendencies require new test strategies. Our research group is working on a new test strategy named thermal testing. The goal of this test technique is to detect if a circuit has structural defects by measuring the temperature at some points of the surface of the silicon where the circuit under test is placed. Temperature measurements can be performed using built-in temperature sensors. The main advantage of this technique is that temperature measurements allow concurrent monitoring of the circuit under test without disturbing its electrical operation (thermal coupling connects the circuit under test and the built-in temperature sensor), making this technique interesting for high performance mixed signal ICs.

The group is working in: thermal characterization of defects in ICs (how the presence of a defect alters the thermal map of the silicon surface), thermal coupling characterization in ICs, thermal analysis of digital and analog circuit and temperature sensor design for test purposes.