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

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 multi-scale 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: peripheral and 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.