Date of Award

Spring 2000

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computational Analysis and Modeling

First Advisor

Richard J. Greechie

Abstract

Thin film technology is of vital importance in microtechnology applications. For instance, thin films of metals, of dielectrics such as SiO2, or Si semiconductors are important components of microelectronic devices. The reduction of the device size to the microscale has the advantage of enhancing the switching speed of the device. The reduction, on the other hand, increases the rate of heat generation that leads to a high thermal load on the microdevice. Heat transfer at the microscale with an ultrafast pulsed-laser is also a very important process for thin films. Hence, studying the thermal behavior of thin films or of micro objects is essential for predicting the performance of a microelectronic device or for obtaining the microstructures. The objective of the research is to develop a numerical method for solving three-dimensional heat transport equations in a double-layered cylindrical thin film with microscale thickness. To this end, the three-dimensional heat transport equations are discretized using the finite element method for the x-y directions and the finite difference method for the z direction. Since the obtained scheme is implicit, a preconditioned Richardson iterative method is employed so that the systems of equations become only two block tri-diagonal linear systems with unknowns at the interface. Using a parallel Gaussian elimination procedure to solve these two block tri-diagonal linear systems, a domain decomposition algorithm for thermal analysis of a double-layered thin film is developed. The numerical procedure is employed to investigate the temperature rise and temperature distribution in a double-layered thin film with a cylindrical gold layer being on top of a cylindrical chromium padding layer. Numerical results are in good agreement with those obtained in previous research. The numerical method can be readily applied to the heat transport problem, where the shape of the film can be arbitrary in the x-y direction and where the film has multilayers.

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