A Thermal Conductance Optimization and Measurement Approach for Uncooled Microbolometers

Date

2011-04-29

Author

Senveli, S. Ufuk
Tanrikulu, M. Yusuf
Akın, Tayfun

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

153
views

0
downloads

This paper introduces an optimization approach of thermal conductance for single level uncooled microbolometer detectors. An efficient detector design is required due to the limited availability of silicon area per pixel, i.e., the pixel pitch, and due to the capabilities of the fabrication line. The trade-offs between physical parameters are studied to attain the best performance, including the thermal conductance, the thermal time constant, the effective temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR), and the active area, where the main performance criterion has been selected as the Noise Equivalent Temperature Difference (NETD). A microbolometer pixel is modeled using theoretical formulations, and simulations are carried out using this model, and then, the accuracy of the model is verified by Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis. Consequently, optimum design parameters, such as the length of the support arms and the choice of interconnect metal can be extracted from the simulations for a defined process flow. Furthermore, a simple and reliable method for measuring the thermal conductance has been introduced. With this method, it is possible to accurately measure the thermal conductance in a large pixel temperature range, which is required especially for high thermal resistance microbolometers as they heat up rapidly in vacuum. The validity and accuracy of this method are also verified by comparing the simulation results with measurements performed on a single pixel microbolometer that is designed and fabricated based on the optimization approach outlined in this paper.

Subject Keywords

Uncooled Microbolometer, Performance Optimization, Thermal Conductance

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/48095

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1117/12.890234

Collections

Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Conference / Seminar

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

A new method to estimate the absorption coefficient for uncooled infrared detectors Tanrikulu, M. Yusuf; Civitci, Fehmi; Akın, Tayfun (2008-03-20) his paper introduces a new method to estimate the total absorption coefficient of uncooled infrared detectors. Current approaches in the literature model the infrared detectors as cascaded transmission lines representing the detector layers, and this model can easily be used to estimate the absorption coefficient if the detector has the same structure at every point. However, the state of the art uncooled infrared detectors do not have same structure at every point, making it not feasible to use this simple...
A multiscale analytical correction technique for two-dimensional thermal models of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs Azarifar, Mohammad; Donmezer, Nazli (2017-07-01) Two-dimensional approaches are widely used in the numerical thermal models of AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) to reduce the high computational cost of the three-dimensional approaches. The aforementioned simplified models predict inaccurate device temperatures with significant overestimation of the thermal resistance. In order to take advantage of the computational efficiency of the two-dimensional models, a correction procedure is necessary for the accurate representation of the actual...
A CMOS n-well microbolometer FPA with temperature coefficient enhancement circuitry Eminoglu, S; Tezcan, DS; Akın, Tayfun (2001-04-20) This paper reports the development of a low-cost CMOS microbolometer focal plane array with a new temperature coefficient enhancement readout circuit. We have recently reported an uncooled microbolometer detector that uses the CMOS n-well layer as the active material, where the suspended and thermally isolated n-well structure is obtained by silicon bulk micromachining of fabricated CMOS dies. In addition, we have successfully fabricated a 16x16 n-well microbolometer FPA. Although n-well is single crystal s...
A low power readout circuit approach for uncooled resistive microbolometer FPAs Tepegoz, Murat; Toprak, Alperen; Akın, Tayfun (2008-03-20) This paper presents a new, low power readout circuit approach for uncooled resistive microbolometer FPAs. The readout circuits of the microbolometer detectors contain parallel readout channels whose outputs are driven and multiplexed on large bus capacitances in order to form the output of the readout circuit. High number of opamps used in the readout channel array and large output capacitances that these opamps should drive necessitates the use of high output current capacity structures, which results in l...
A Detailed Analysis for the Absorption Coefficient of Multilevel Uncooled Infrared Detectors Küçük, Serhat; Akın, Tayfun (2011-04-29) This paper introduces a detailed analysis on the calculation of the absorption coefficient of multilevel uncooled infrared detectors. The analysis is carried out considering a two-level 25 mu m pixel pitch infrared detector with a sandwich type resistor which is divided into sub-regions consisting of different stacks of layers. The absorption coefficients of these different sub-regions are calculated individually by using the cascaded transmission line model, including the main body, arms, and the regions w...

Citation Formats

S. U. Senveli, M. Y. Tanrikulu, and T. Akın, “A Thermal Conductance Optimization and Measurement Approach for Uncooled Microbolometers,” 2011, vol. 8012, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/48095.