Design, fabrication and testing of 17um pitch 640x480 uncooled infrared focal plane array detector

Abstract

Uncooled infrared focal plane array (UIRFPA) detectors are widely used in industrial thermography cameras, night vision goggles, thermal weapon sights, as well as automotive night vision systems. To meet the market requirement for smaller pixel pitch and higher resolution, we have developed a 17um pitch 640x480 UIRFPA detector. The detector is based on amorphous silicon (a-Si) microbolometer technology, the readout integrated circuit (ROIC) is designed and manufactured with 0.35um standard CMOS technology on 8 inch wafer, the microbolometer is fabricated monolithically on the ROIC using an unique surface micromachining process developed inside the company, the fabricated detector is vacuum packaged with hermetic metal package and tested. In this paper we present the design, fabrication and testing of the 17um 640x480 detector. The design trade-off of the detector ROIC and pixel micro-bridge structure will be discussed, by comparison the calculation and simulation to the testing results. The novel surface micromachining process using silicon sacrificial layer will be presented, which is more compatible with the CMOS process than the traditional process with polyimide sacrificial layer, and resulted in good processing stability and high fabrication yield. The performance of the detector is tested, with temperature equivalent temperature difference (NETD) less than 60mK at F/1 aperture, operability better than 99.5%. The results demonstrate that the detector can meet the requirements of most thermography and night vision applications.