Heterodyne lock-in thermal coupling measurements in integrated circuits: Applications to test and characterization.

Heterodyne strategies can be used to characterize thermal coupling in integrated circuits when the electrical bandwidth of the dissipating circuit is beyond the bandwidth of the thermal coupling mechanism. From the characterization of the thermal coupling, two possible applications are described: extraction of characteristics of the dissipating circuit (the determination of the center frequency of a low-noise amplifier) and the extraction of the thermal coupling transfer function.