Uncooled microbolometer infrared focal plane array in standard CMOS

Deniz Sabuncuoglu Tezcan; Selim Eminoglu; Orhan Sevket Akar; Tayfun Akin

doi:10.1117/12.429399

12 June 2001 Uncooled microbolometer infrared focal plane array in standard CMOS

Deniz Sabuncuoglu Tezcan, Selim Eminoglu, Orhan Sevket Akar, Tayfun Akin

Proceedings Volume 4288, Photodetectors: Materials and Devices VI; (2001) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.429399
Event: Symposium on Integrated Optics, 2001, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

This paper reports implementation of a low-cost microbolometer focal plane array using n-well layer in a CMOS process as the microbolometer material. N-well microbolometer structures are suspended for thermal isolation by post-etching of fabricated CMOS dies using silicon bulk-micromachining techniques. Although n-well has a moderate TCR of 0.5-0.65%/K at 300K, it still provides a reasonable performance due to its single crystal structure which contributes low 1/f noise. Detailed thermal simulations in ANSYS were performed to obtain an optimized structure. Various prototype FPAs with 16x16 array sizes have been implemented with 80 mm x 80 mm and 50 mm x 50 mm pixel sizes. The measurements and calculations show that the n-well microbolometers can provide a responsivity of 8.5 x 10⁶ V/W, a detectivity of 5.5 x 10⁹ cmHz^1/2/W, and an NETD of 260 mK at 30 frames per second using a simple, fully-serial readout approach with an integrator output. The performance of the array can be increased with advanced readout techniques and improved pixel structures. The CMOS n-well microbolometer approach seems very cost-effective to produce large focal plane arrays for uncooled infrared imaging with reasonable performance.

Citation Download Citation

Deniz Sabuncuoglu Tezcan, Selim Eminoglu, Orhan Sevket Akar, and Tayfun Akin "Uncooled microbolometer infrared focal plane array in standard CMOS", Proc. SPIE 4288, Photodetectors: Materials and Devices VI, (12 June 2001); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.429399

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