Planarization of CMOS ROIC dies for uncooled detectors

This paper presents a planarization procedure to achieve a flat CMOS surface of Readout Integrated Circuit (ROIC) for the integration between uncooled infrared detector arrays and ROIC. The CMOS fabrication process produces about 2 μm surface roughness on the silicon wafer, so the CMOS dies must be first planarized before integration with the detector arrays. To acquire a satisfying surface roughness in the small CMOS die, three commercially available polymers including bisbenzocyclobutene (BCB) and two types of polyimides are evaluated in our experiments. BCB shows the best results for our applications. A single layer of BCB coating successfully reduce the surface topology from 2 μm to less than 1500 A and two layers of BCB coating reduce the surface topology to about 600 A.