DEVELOPMENT OF MEMS THERMOPILES AND RELATED APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Nowadays, thermopile has been widely utilized in various applications diversifying from military use to people?s everyday life. In order to fulfill highly effective thermopile (e.g. high responsivity, low electrical noise etc.), the researchers need to address the optimization of thermopile structure layout and thermoelectric materials. Furthermore, the design of infrared (IR)absorber on thermopile is another important work for some specification related to infrared (e.g. thermopile IR image sensor, gas sensor, etc.). In my work, a stacked double layer (SDL) thermopile was proposed with over 100% performance to the conventional planar thermopile. Besides, the characterization of nanometer-thick polycrystalline Silicon (poly-Si) film in my work demonstrates the superior thermoelectric properties of ultra thin poly-Si. At last, various infrared absorbers on thermopile have been studied to explore more applications of thermopile.