Rapid heating and cooling chamber for a photonics junction measurement system

Abstract

Since many industrial applications require heat treatment processes or validation tests under certain ambient temperatures, thermal design is a key issue to be considered in order to ensure fast heating and cooling capabilities. Although most industrial furnaces provide the required isothermal conditions for various test applications or calibrations, a number of them does not provide rapid heating and cooling inside a closed system and the thermal equilibrium over different regions of the system are not satisfied as intended. This brings a number of challenges for the performance test of most electronics, which are affected by ambient temperatures, such as LEDs, lasers and transistors. Particularly, a test environment that can quickly and accurately adjust a uniformly distributed isothermal domain can be useful for many electronic components in order to test their performance at preselected ambient temperatures. In such systems, the design parameters have to be adjusted depending on the desired conditions. In fact, the design of those systems has to be planned in detail to achieve a system working fast and accurate, which shall contribute to reduction in operating time. Therefore, this study focuses on proposing a new approach to the development of a high-performance and high-resolution heating and cooling chamber used in a junction temperature measurement of light emitting diodes (LEDs). The major objective thereby is to achieve high heating and cooling rates of a controlled chamber that satisfies thermal conditions at a user defined temperature interval between 20°C and 80°C. Therefore, material properties and geometrical dimensions, power requirements and cooling performances of the chamber are analyzed as major design parameters. Numerical models are created for various design options, and simulations are performed for various working conditions under certain design constraints. The relationships between design parameters are determined. A final design is proposed that is able to reduce measurement time of photonic components at a temperature uniformity of less than + 0.5 °C. © 2020 IEEE.