Frequency-Domain Thermoreflectance Technique for Measuring Thermal Conductivity and Interface Thermal Conductance of Thin Films

The thermal conductivity of thin films and interface thermal conductance of dissimilar materials play a critical role in the functionality and the reliability of micro/nano-materials and devices. The transient thermoreflectance methods, including the time-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) and the frequency-domain thermoreflectance (FDTR) techniques are excellent approaches for the challenging measurements of interface thermal conductance of dissimilar materials. A theoretical model is introduced to analyze the TDTR and FDTR signals in a tri-layer structure which consists of metal transducer, thin film, and substrate. Such a tri-layer structure represents typical sample geometry in the thermoreflectance measurements for the thermal conductivity and interface thermal conductance of thin films. The sensitivity of TDTR signals to the thermal conductivity of thin films is analyzed to show that the modulation frequency needs to be selected carefully for a high accuracy TDTR measurement. However, such a frequency selection is closely related to the unknown thermal properties and consequently hard to make before the measurement. Fortunately this limitation can be avoided in FDTR. Depending on the modulation frequency, the heat transport in such a tri-layer could be divided into three regimes based on the thickness of the film and the thermal penetration depth, the thermal conductivity of thin films and interface thermal conductance can be subsequently obtained by fitting different frequency regions of one FDTR measurement curve. FDTR measurements are then conducted along with the aforementioned analysis to obtain the thermal conductivity of SiO2 thin films and interface thermal conductance SiO2 and Si. FDTR measurement results agree well with the TDTR measurements, but promises to be a much easier implementation than TDTR measurements.