An improved thermal Type microsensor with thermal Isolation microcracks

A new idea of improving complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) thermopile performance is introduced to reduce the thermal conductance by leading the microcracks into structure of thermopile, which greatly increases the heat flow barrier. A highly sensitive infrared detector requires a low thermal conductance to maximize the temperature change and signal induced by incident IR radiation. Several designs of infrared microsensors are proposed to study influential parameters from microcrack for improving performance of thermopile. To that end, by using some adequate designs of polysilicon architecture, we can greatly reduce the heat flow from the main stream without introducing further electric resistance, which is related with noise. Firstly we develop such a structure of thermopile with low thermal conductance and high performance by using CMOS compatible process which can be easily and exactly fabricated. The suspended structure of infrared sensors is used in this study to provide ideal, thermally isolated, structures for support of the thin film detector. We also simulate the heat flow of the new structures. The results show good match with our original idea.