4th International Workshop on THERMAL INVESTIGATIONS of ICs and MICROSTRUCTURES (THERMINIC 1998) September 27-29,Cannes, "Côte d'Azur", France: Special Issue, Microelectronics Journal

Therminic Workshops are a series of events to discuss essential thermal questions of microelectronics and microstructures. These questions are becoming crucial with increasing element density of deep submicron downscaling of integrated circuits, necessitating thermal simulation, monitoring and cooling. Thermal management is expected to become an increasingly dominating factor of systems cost as a result of the growing amount of power dissipated in a package, in an MCM, or on a board. The mobile parts of MEMS raise new thermal and thermo-mechanical problems to be solved. To facilitate a deeper understanding and to find better solutions for these problems, regular discussions with the experts in the field are needed. It is now already a tradition of Therminic to publish the best papers of the Workshop in leading scientific periodicals. Papers of the previous issues of the workshop were published in the IEEE Transactions of VLSI systems, IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology, the Sensors and Actuators A Physical and the Microelectronics Journal. This is now the third time that selected papers of the Therminic Workshop are published in the form of a special issue of the Microelectronics Journal. This year some of the papers of the THERMINIC Workshop are going to be published in the IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology. We have selected papers for the Microelectronics Journal that are more theoretically oriented