Thermal Imaging for Electronics Design and Testing
With the global supply of semiconductor materials and microchips facing severe disruptions—from the COVID-19 pandemic to natural disasters in chip-producing regions, to now, a ramped-up trade war between the United States and China—governments worldwide are racing to build up domestic supplies. Legislation such as Chips Acts in the United States and the European Union are directing billions of dollars in spending and tax credits towards investment in microchip production, including money for research and manufacturing.
Thermal imaging cameras are crucial to all the development stages for these products. Their ability to visualize heat allows engineers to discover design flaws and manufacturers to monitor circuitry for heat dissipation or thermal runaway. Thermal cameras can help prevent costly downtime and shorten the design cycle, while also helping manufacturers ensure product quality and performance.
A key issue for chip developers is the challenge of delivering higher-functioning chips at smaller sizes while also preventing waste energy from the radiant heat these systems can generate. With more than 1,500 microchips in a typical electric vehicle, even small energy savings per device can significantly improve efficiency and performance.
Thermal imaging can calculate heat loss from a system, leading to overall improvements in efficiency. Systems that are more efficient use less energy and can operate without cooling fans that take up space and generate noise.
The Value of a High-Tech Solution
Thermal runaway is a major concern when designing electronics, especially with the rise of electric vehicles and systems using lithium-ion batteries.
Electronics developers routinely push their designs both electrically and thermally to deliver the cutting-edge performance customers demand, particularly picosecond range speeds. The tradeoff is a higher risk for components to heat up, or even overheat. For designers and test teams, the challenge is finding out exactly which components in a given design are heating up.
While engineers can use thermal modeling to predict heat loads on printed circuit boards (PCBs) or microchips, obtaining accurate, real-time temperature measurements is much more valuable to the design process.
“We want products that have high performance. Thermal stress is a key part of that because small parts switching high currents and high speeds get hot. We don’t have the analytical tools to predict what component temperatures are going to be within 10, or even 20, degrees Celsius sometimes. So, we have to physically measure the temperatures in engineering and testing.”
—Chief Electronics Engineer for a US-based aerospace PCB developer
Unfortunately, measuring temperature with traditional tools such as thermocouples requires some level of guesswork. In addition, thermocouples could act as a heat sink on small components, resulting in inaccurate temperature data.
Spot pyrometers might also be considered for this application. However, they only measure heat at a specific point and thus offer an incomplete picture of a target’s thermal properties.
For more accurate thermal characterization, infrared cameras are the optimal choice for non-contact temperature measurement across an entire chip or PCB. A single camera can produce thousands of non-contact temperature readings at the same time—one for each pixel in every frame of data. These readings are then converted into a map of the heat distribution of the device.
Depending on the camera used—cooled or uncooled, high speed or high definition, handheld or fixed—researchers can measure temperatures at thousands of points across a target, take accurate readings down to a three micron (µm) spot size, and record high-speed temperature data of dynamic targets. Higher performance cameras can also be triggered to initiate capture, ensuring researchers never miss a frame of critical data.
Percentage of surveyed customers who cut testing and production times in half.
Faster Test Times Means Greater Savings
Infrared imaging provides a significant return on investment, especially when testing and identifying problems that were once difficult to locate quickly.
In a survey of customers in the R&D field, FLIR found that 71% reported cutting their testing and product development times in half, showing more than a 2x improvement in test times. This led to an average cost savings of more than $55,000.
Average cost savings
For manufacturers, the return on investment comes from images that pinpoint design flaws, reducing test times and time to market while improving product quality. Regardless of the industry, thermography offers essential insights for electronics design and testing.
FLIR A50/A70 Research & Development Kits are cost-effective solutions for engineers and technicians needing thermal imaging for quality assurance or troubleshooting printed circuit boards. These kits offer a range of resolutions and lens options, come with FLIR Research Studio Software for image analysis, and can take advantage of industry-standard connections to integrate into custom software applications when needed.
What Thermal Camera Do I Need?
In our article, What You Need to Know About IR Detectors, we discuss five features to consider when choosing an infrared camera, including detector speed, sensitivity, spatial resolution, synchronization, and spectral filtering. But there are additional features that can improve electronic design and testing.
For example, thermal imaging systems that are scalable can be used for testing in development but also be integrated into production for inline inspections and verifications.
Another feature to consider is image resolution. While accurate data collection relies on more than a high pixel count, you gain the advantage of finer image detail when working with a high-resolution thermal camera. And because each pixel provides a point of temperature data, working with a camera that’s 640 × 512 can provide 327,680 points of measurement—more than four times the data provided by a 320 × 240 thermal camera.
Choosing a thermal imaging camera with swappable lenses often brings the option of close-up lenses. These lenses allow you to reduce the working distance to your target and provide a higher spatial resolution for the most pixels on your target. Magnified views can be used to evaluate mixed signal devices or small semiconductor structures, achieving resolutions down to less than three µm per pixel.
FLIR A8580 MWIR Compact HD Thermal Cameras maximizes the number of measurement pixels on a target, thanks to a1280 × 1024 detector and a suite of manual and remote focus lenses. Single cable connectivity using Gigabit Ethernet or CoaXPress provides complete camera control plus data capturing in FLIR Research Studio software, so users can analyze and understand data quickly.
Software Considerations
Choosing the right thermal imaging software can enhance the capabilities of your camera, providing quick data connection, recording features, triggering, and analysis.
FLIR Research Studio, for example, allows simultaneous connection to multiple cameras and analysis of data from various sources on the same plot or table. It supports conditional recording, triggering acquisition based on temperature thresholds, and customizable workspaces for efficient data management and sharing.
One standout feature is the ability to perform visible and infrared image fusion in real-time, blending images to provide a comprehensive view of thermal characteristics without losing temperature details.
Another concern for researchers is emissivity, which describes the radiation efficiency of a target compared to a blackbody at the same wavelength, angle, and temperature. PCB surfaces often contain metal, which reflects infrared radiation and can therefore lead to underreported temperatures. FLIR Research Studio software allows users to set separate emissivity values for each region of interest, ensuring accurate temperature measurements across different components.
Finally, Research Studio Professional software offers the FLIR MIX™ Toolkit as an add-on, so users can combine thermal and visual data in real-time on live data or in post-processing.
As the electronics industry faces mounting pressure to innovate faster and more efficiently amid global supply chain challenges, thermal imaging has emerged as an indispensable tool across the entire product lifecycle. From early-stage design validation to final production quality control, infrared cameras provide engineers and manufacturers with the precision, speed, and insight needed to meet modern performance demands.
By enabling real-time, non-contact thermal analysis, these systems help identify hidden flaws, optimize energy efficiency, and prevent costly failures—ultimately accelerating time to market and improving product reliability. As thermal imaging technology continues to evolve, its integration into electronics design and testing will only deepen, empowering teams to build smarter, safer, and more efficient devices for the future.
