Test chips allow pre-production thermal engineering

ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) and ASSPs (Application Specific Standard Products) have become increasingly common in recent years, and thus greater attention is being applied to their long term reliability, with particular focus on thermal reliability. Most semiconductor manufacturers are careful to advise designers of the need for proper power management calculations, often recommending heat sinks to be used in compact designs.

This places the burden of solving temperature related problems on the shoulders of the user. The use of TTCs allows manufacturers and designers creating their own ASIC/ASSP devices to thermally engineer silicon in the pre-production phase. TCs allow system designers to fully model, measure and modify their designs before committing to costly silicon.

TTCs are silicon die, used to model and measure the thermal performance of chip designs in situ before investment in masks and wafers is required. Modelling allows the creation of multiple individual heat sources on the TTC die, identical to the heat sources that will occur on the final IC. Strategically located temperature sensors give precise measurements of the temperature of the die, at multiple locations, simultaneously.

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