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[12p-PA1-11] A sensitive MEMS bolometer with high temperature stability
Keywords:terahertz, bolometer, thermal stability
In this work, we reported an uncooled sensitive MEMS bolometer with a high temperature stability. The MEMS bolometer senses the temperature change by measuring a shift in the mechanical resonance frequency caused by the thermal stress in the MEMS beam, and can detect a temperature change as small as ~1 μK even at room temperature. Meanwhile, since the environmental temperature fluctuation only gives an overall thermal expansion of the device, which does not contribute to the thermal stress in the beam, thus does not change the resonance frequency much. The frequency shift caused by local temperature rise of the beam is much larger than that caused by environmental temperature rise. The deposition of a stress-compensation layer will furthermore improve the thermal stability without significantly degrading its thermal sensitivity.