Towards an Ultra-Sensitive Temperature Sensor for Uncooled Infrared Sensing in CMOS–MEMS Technology

Abstract

Microbolometers and photon detectors are two main technologies to address the needs in Infrared Sensing applications. While the microbolometers in both complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology offer many advantages over photon detectors, they still suffer from nonlinearity and relatively low temperature sensitivity. This paper not only offers a reliable solution to solve the nonlinearity problem but also demonstrate a noticeable potential to build ultra-sensitive CMOS–MEMS temperature sensor for infrared (IR) sensing applications. The possibility of a 31× improvement in the total absolute frequency shift with respect to ambient temperature change is verified via both COMSOL (multiphysics solver) and theory. Nonlinearity problem is resolved by an operating temperature sensor around the beam bending point. The effect of both pull-in force and dimensional change is analyzed in depth, and a drastic increase in performance is achieved when the applied pull-in force between adjacent beams is kept as small as possible. The optimum structure is derived with a length of 57 µm and a thickness of 1 µm while avoiding critical temperature and, consequently, device failure. Moreover, a good match between theory and COMSOL is demonstrated, and this can be used as a guidance to build state-of-the-art designs.