Single crystal silicon micromachined pulsed infrared light source

A Low-Power, Low-Cost Infra-Red Emitter in CMOS Technology

“…Devices based on doped polysilicon heaters have been described by [9][10], whereas [11][12][13][14] describe designs based on doped single-crystal silicon heaters. [15] reports on various materials for IR heaters at very high temperatures (800 ºC -1000 ºC), including platinum, single-crystal silicon, and doped tin oxide.…”

SnO2:Sb – A new material for high-temperature MEMS heater applications: Performance and limitations

“…Such oxide layers also perform very well as high-quality insulator layers. The crystalline silicon base structure itself possesses a high thermal conductivity, which is good for achieving short thermal response times and thus a high modulation depth when MEMS heaters are operated in a discontinuous ac mode [1]. High thermal conductivity, however, is not compatible with low electrical power consumption [8,9].…”

“…Possible areas of application include modulated thermal infrared (IR) sources, flameless ionisation detectors and surface ionisation devices [1][2][3][4][5]. Such applications call for micro heater devices that can withstand prolonged operation at temperatures up to 1000 • C. In previous work we have demonstrated thermal IR emitters employing antimony-doped tin dioxide (SnO 2 :Sb) as a novel heater material and showed that such devices exhibit a high-temperature stability that is superior to a whole range of metallic and semiconductor heater materials [6].…”

Fabrication of an infrared emitter using a generic integration platform based on wire bonding

“…Typically, MEMS IR emitters utilize silicon as substrate material and the active emitting structure is either formed on top of a membrane [19,20,21], on a suspended micro hotplate [22,23,24] or on other suspended micro bridge structures [25,26]. To improve the emissivity of emitter surfaces, the deposition of carbon-based films [27,28] as well as the modification of the bulk or surface texture of the emitting component has been proposed [29,30,31].…”