Thermofluorescent Conjugated Polymer Sensors for Nano- and Microscale Temperature Monitoring

It is shown that due to the inherent irreversible non-fluorescence to fluorescence transition feature of polydiacetylene (PDA) supramolecules that occurs in response to thermal pertur-bations, PDA vesicles embedded in a host polymer matrix function as nano/microscale temperature indicators. As a result, they are used to monitor temperature gradients on an integrated circuit chip and to uncover submicrometer size filamentary defects in a resistance random access memory (RRAM) device structure. This new methodology should find a wide applicability in carrying out temperature distribution analysis on semiconductor and micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) devices where the detection of local heat deviations of small-scale components is critical.