Direct temperature measurement for VLSI circuits and 3-D modeling of self-heating in sub-0.13 μm SOI technologies

This paper describes a novel temperature measurement technique which utilizes the gate-poly of the active device as a temperature sensor to directly measure the temperature rise in single- or multi-finger devices commonly used in high performance microprocessors. Measured results are corroborated with 3-D thermal modeling for sub-0.13 μm SOI and strained-Si on SOI technologies. The thermal conductivities for thin silicon films are extracted and shown to be 4 to 10 times lower than for bulk silicon, which represents the first measured nano-scale thermal conduction effect in a real state-of-the-art semiconductor device. The impact on the performance of a high duty-cycle clock buffer circuit in a high-performance microprocessor is evaluated. © 2005 IEEE.