Extraction of thermal parameters of microbolometer infrared detectors using electrical measurement

Abstract

The performance of microbolometer infrared sensors is typically characterized by its thermal time constant, heat capacitance, and thermal conductance. Therefore, the determination of these parameters accurately and efficiently is of considerable interest for the design and operation of microbolometer infrared sensors. Usually, the thermal time constant is obtained by measuring the frequency response of microbolometers under infrared excitation and the thermal conductance and capacity are extracted using electrical measurement. In this paper, a technique is described to extract all three parameters using a single electrical measurement. In the measurement, we have employed a Wheatstone Bridge consisting of a bolometer and three reference resistors. The resistance of the bolometer changes as a result of self-heating under an external bias which in turn generates an output voltage across the Bridge. The time dependence of the output voltage was used to extract thermal parameters of the bolometer. We believe this technique is useful in determining the thermal parameters of microbolometer based sensors.