Integrated Interface Circuits for MEMS Contact-less Temperature Sensors

Thermal sensors, exploiting the relation between the thermal radiation emitted by an object and its temperature, as expressed by the Stefan-Boltzmann law, allow realizing contact-less temperature measurements, required in a wide range of applications, ranging from fever measurements to presence detection for security and climate control systems. With the advent of smart homes and Internet of Things (IoT) and the wide spreading of mobile and wearable devices, the need for low-cost low-power thermal sensors has arisen, therefore moving the focus of the research away from standard bolometers and pyroelectric detectors and towards uncooled infrared (IR) sensors solutions that can be easily integrated. Bolometers and pyroelectric detectors, which are the main types of thermal sensors found nowadays on the market, in fact, do not comply with the low-cost and easy integration specifications. Integration of thermal sensors is possible through Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, which allows combining on the same substrate or chip both electrical and mechanical structures with dimensions in the micro-meter range, thus providing structures with high thermal isolation and low thermal mass. The micromachining processes that are required to thermally isolate the sensing element from the substrate are versatile and include anisotropic wet etching, dry and wet etching, electrochemical etch stop, or the use of silicon-on-insulator (SOI). In this scenario, STMicroelectronics has fabricated two different novel thermal sensors, which fulfill the low-cost low-power specifications for smart homes, IoT and mobile and wearable devices, while also being compatible with CMOS processes and thus easily integrated: a polysilicon thermopile and a micromachined CMOS transistor, from now on referred to as TMOS. During my Ph.D. activity I was involved in a cooperation between the STMicroelectronics Analog MEMS and Sensors R&D group and the University of Pavia, that led to the design of two readout circuits specifically tailored on the sensors characteristics, one for the thermopile sensor and one for the TMOS (developed by the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology), which were integrated in two test-chip prototypes and thoroughly characterized through measurements as stand-alone devices and as a system with the sensor they were designed for.