Christopher Wegemer: Signal Processing Methods of Thermoreflectance Imaging

As microelectronic devices rapidly get smaller and smaller, the process of characterizing their functionality becomes increasingly complex. In particular, knowledge of energy and heat dissipation is crucial to the performance of electronics, especially when dealing with the nano-scale devices being developed. During this summer at the University of California –Santa Cruz, Chris Wegemer implemented a technique that captured thermal images of extremely small devices operating at very high frequencies. Using basic signal processing methods, the signal from the device could be imaged at a much slower frequency that was within the limits of a camera. Shown below is one such image.