Feeling the heat in the tiny world of microelectronics

Dr Trong Toan Tran

DECRA School of Electrical and Data Engineering

University of Technology Sydney

Abstract

Electronic devices—machines that contains billions of tiny switches called transistors—have revolutionized the way we live: from online shopping to remote working to instant access to the Internet. As these transistors are miniaturized down to the fundamental limit set by the laws of physics, localized heating in these minuscule switches can lead to an overheating or, in extreme case, a catastrophic failure. As such, there is an urgent need for metrology that can accurately identify these thermal anomalies, known as hot spots, in prototypical electronic gadgets. Our research focuses on the development of high-resolution, non-contact thermal sensing techniques that can identify these thermal hot spots. In particular, we use optically active defect centers, aslo known as quantum emitters, in wide bandgap semiconductors such as diamond to achieve such a goal. By leveraging the temperature-dependent emission of these defect centers, we can perform real-time temperature monitoring down to the sub-micron limit—revealing the uneven thermal distribution on these microelectronic devices.

Biography
Dr Trong Toan Tran is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) and a DECRA (previously a Chancellor Postdoctoral Research Fellow) at the School of Electrical and Data Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, UTS. He is a physicist and engineer with a background in Material Science and Chemical Engineering. He leads the Nanoscale Electro-Thermo-Optical laboratory (NETO) at UTS Tech Lab (www.tttranlab.com). His research interest includes quantum optics, nanophotonics, solid-state physics, thermometry and nanofabrication. Currently, Dr Tran actively researches novel quantum light sources and their applications in mapping thermal distribution in electronic circuits, nanoscale sensing, and advanced photonic technologies.

Dr Tran has been given several prestigious prizes and awards, including the 2022 Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), the Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2018), UTS Chancellor's Award for best thesis (2018), AIP Award for Postgraduate Excellence in Physics (2017), Best Poster Award at ICONN (2016), etc.

As of June 2023, Dr Tran's track record features an h-index of 28 and a total citation of over 4400. He has also attracted close to $1M in research income, thanks to his DECRA and CPDRF fellowship and other small fundings. He has been an invited speaker for several international conferences, such as AVS, SPIE, ICPS, and ICEAN. He frequently publishes in top journals in his field, including Nature Nanotechnology (1x), Science Advances (x1), Nature Communications (1x), Advanced Materials (x3), Nano Letter (x4), ACS Nano (4x), ACS Photonics (x5), Physical Review Applied (x1), ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (x3), etc.

Research group website: https://tttranlab.com/