Performance enhancement of uncooled infrared focal plane array by integrating metamaterial absorber

This letter presents an infrared (IR) focal plane array (FPA) with metamaterial absorber (MMA) integrated to enhance its performance. A glass substrate, on which arrays of bimaterial cantilevers are fabricated as the thermal-sensitive pixels by a polyimide surface sacrificial process, is employed to allow the optical readout from the back side of the substrate. Whereas the IR wave radiates onto the FPA from the front side, which consequently avoids the energy loss caused by the silicon substrate compared with the previous works. This structure also facilitates the integration of MMA by introducing a layer of periodic square resonators atop the SiNx structural layer to form a metal/dielectric/metal stack with the gold mirror functioning as the ground plane. A comparative experiment was carried out on the FPAs that use MMA and ordinary SiNx as the absorbers, respectively. The performance improvement was verified by the evaluation of the absorbers as well as the imaging results of both FPAs.