Monitoring Thermal Stress in Wafer-Scale Integrated Circuits by the Attentive Vision Method Using an Infrared Camera

摘要

This paper is dedicated to the development of a thermal monitoring system for microelectronics based on the attentive vision approach as applied to image sequence analysis using an infrared camera. The attentive vision method implements multiscale image sequence analysis by a spatiotemporal attention operator to detect feature points, which are located inside potential thermal stress regions. The attention operator is a linear aggregation of temporal change and spatial saliency filters. The monitoring process is organized in two hierarchical phases: 1) peripheral and 2) focal. The focal monitoring is mostly carried out through the tracking of stress-relevant feature-point areas and analysis of their spatiotemporal descriptors. The thermal monitoring experiments conducted with wafer-scale integrated circuits have confirmed the reliability of the proposed approach and showed its high potential in image sequence analysis for monitoring purposes.