Characterization of the thermal conductivity of insulating thin films by scanning thermal microscopy

This paper reports on the abilities of a Scanning Thermal Microscopy (SThM) method to characterize the thermal conductivity of insulating materials and thin films used in microelectronics and microsystems. It gives a review of the previous works on the subject and gives new results allowing showing the performance of a new method proposed for reducing the thermal conductivity of meso-porous silicon by swift heavy ion irradiation. Meso-porous silicon samples were prepared by anodisation of silicon wafers and underwent irradiation by 845 MeV 208Pb ions, with fluences of 4×1011 and 7×1011 cm−2. Thermal measurements show that irradiation reduced thermal conductivity by a factor of up to 2.