A ⟨1 0 0⟩ direction front-etched membrane structure for a micro-bolometer

In this work, a CMOS-compatible membrane-supported micro-bolometer with a front-etched design along the 1 1 0 direction is fabricated. The openings in the absorbing area make etching faster on (1 0 0) planes and form a perfect suspending structure. The experiment shows that the design of 1 0 0-oriented windows in an IR absorbing area together with a thermal sensitive thin film results in short releasing time and good IR absorption. The typical measured responsivity and detectivity of such a bolometer are 8.685 × 103 V W−1 and 2.451 × 108 cm Hz1/2 W−1, respectively. The easy and fast fabrication design makes this structure very suitable for low cost, high performance applications.