Development of infrared thermal mapping technique for electronic devices

The goal of this research project is to develop an experimental setup that is capable of demonstrating thermal behavior of the electronic device. The project focuses on thermal mapping at device, integrated circuit and printed circuit board (PCB) level. A unique technique to perform thermal mapping on integrated circuits and printed circuit board based on Infrared Thermography is proposed in this research project. The developed experimental setup is capable of performing steady state and transient analysis at device and PCB level. The proposed test setup is applied to perform thermal mapping on 68HC11 microcontroller board to predict accurate temperature distribution on the real time operating printed circuit board. The accuracy and validation of the experimental setup are the two major challenges faced in this work. Apart from this, to know the exact transistor junction temperature, it is necessary to develop methodology that prevents heat spreading, allows proper cooling and the one that provides stable cooling thermal coefficient. The performance of infrared thermography has been validated against thermocouple results. The experimental results are compared with the ones obtained by digital thermometer. In order to achieve stability and certainty in the results, insulated environment is preferred. Thermocouple results can be taken as reference since it is in physical contact with the die or the package. Cooling of the electronic device is also performed in this work. Oil based heatsink has been implemented using mineral Aldrich oil which is specially designed for IR spectroscopy. Several different combinations of layers of coating of Boron Nitride spray and black spray paint are deployed with different emissivity settings. The effect of the number of color layer coatings and emissivity values have been investigated. Various challenges pertaining to heat spreading, heat dependent cooling coefficients and spatial resolution have been resolved. The performance of the test setup has been evaluated for both steady state and transient analysis. In additon, thermocouple results have been taken as reference.