An all-ZnO microbolometer for infrared imaging

Date
2014
Advisor
Instructor
Source Title
Infrared Physics & Technology
Print ISSN
1350-4495
Electronic ISSN
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Volume
67
Issue
Pages
245 - 249
Language
English
Type
Article
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract

Microbolometers are extensively used for uncooled infrared imaging applications. These imaging units generally employ vanadium oxide or amorphous silicon as the active layer and silicon nitride as the absorber layer. However, using different materials for active and absorber layers increases the fabrication and integration complexity of the pixel structure. In order to reduce fabrication steps and therefore increase the yield and reduce the cost of the imaging arrays, a single layer can be employed both as the absorber and the active material. In this paper, we propose an all-ZnO microbolometer, where atomic layer deposition grown zinc oxide is employed both as the absorber and the active material. Optical constants of ZnO are measured and fed into finite-difference-time-domain simulations where absorption performances of microbolometers with different gap size and ZnO film thicknesses are extracted. Using the results of these optical simulations, thermal simulations are conducted using finite-element-method in order to extract the noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD) and thermal time constant values of several bolometer structures with different gap sizes, arm and film thicknesses. It is shown that the maximum performance of 171 mK can be achieved with a body thickness of 1.1 μm and arm thickness of 50 nm, while the fastest response with a time constant of 0.32 ms can be achieved with a ZnO thickness of 150 nm both in arms and body. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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Other identifiers
Book Title
Keywords
Atomic layer deposition, Microbolometers, Transparent conductive oxides, Uncooled infrared imaging, Zinc oxide
Citation
Published Version (Please cite this version)