In-Plane Thermal Conductivity of Ultra-Thin Al₂O₃ Films Measured by Micro-Raman

In the past decades, heat transport in thin film structures has been extensively studied due to its importance in performance optimization of micro/nano-scale devices. A large amount of heat is generated during the operation of electronic devices and must be dissipated efficiently via dielectric electrical insulating films, thus it is crucial to investigate and engineer the thermal properties of thin film structures. Numerous methods have been developed to measure thin film thermal conductivity, many of which took advantage of electrical heating and temperature sensing such as the 3ω method [1], scanning thermal microscopy (SThM) [2], etc. These methods require the heaters/sensors to directly contact the samples surface, inducing the risk to bias the temperature field; also, the contacting components add a significant complexity to the originally simple 2-D film structure, which increases the difficulty of modeling and data analysis.