International Workshop on Thermal Investigations of ICs and Microstructures (THERMINIC 1996) September 25-27, 1996, Budapest, Hungary: Special Issue of Microelectronics Journal

The first Therminic Workshop was organized in the fall of 1995 in Grenoble. Therminic comes from THERMal INvestigations of ICs and microstructures and it is the title of a Copernicus research project of the European Union. The subject of the workshop involves all the fields related on the one hand to integrated circuits, microelectronics or microsystems, and on the other hand to thermal and electro-thermal effects, to their simulation, modelling or application. A large part of the papers of the workshop dealt with microelectronics problems. Several sessions dealt with the thermal simulation and modelling of IC chips and packages, and there was a whole session devoted to different approaches to coupled electro-thermal simulation of integrated circuits. Thermography, that is surface thermal mapping and measurement questions of integrated circuits, was also discussed in a special session of the workshop. We were very pleased that the Microelectronics Journal gave us the possibility of presenting the appropriate papers of the Therminic Workshop in a special issue, since all the above-mentioned subjects are very close to the usual subject field of the MicroelectronicsJournal. We have tried to make this special issue open to any appropriate papers dealing with the thermal problems of microelectronics, so that - - although this special issue is based on the papers of the Therminic Workshop - - we have invited further papers in the same field. We think that this was a good decision because some further valuable papers were submitted to this special issue