An ultrafast IR thermography system for transient temperature detection on electronic devices

This paper presents a new Infrared thermography system for thermal characterization of semiconductor electronic devices in transient and steady-state applications. The developed set-up is based on an IR camera having a 100Hz frame-rate at full-frame and a focal plane array of 640×512 InSb sensors. In order to extend the dynamic capabilities of the system a synchronization network generates timing signals to drive the experiment and trigger the IR-camera in an equivalent-time acquisition mode, up to 1MHz equivalent bandwidth. Moreover the proposed synchronized solution is able to detect thermal maps in a non-repetitive, single event, experiment. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed IR system, thermal measurements are presented on commercial Power-MOSFET, during short-circuit (SC) tests, and Power Schottky diode in unclamped inductive switching (UIS) test.