A nondestructive analysis method for the frontside-release process of thermal sensors

Abstract

Thermal sensors always have suspended structure to improve their performance. Frontside-release process is a crucial technology to fabricate suspended structure. It is of great importance to monitor the release states; however, the traditional microscope observations are destructive. In this paper, a nondestructive analysis method for the frontside-release process by analyzing the equivalent thermal conductance of thermal sensor is proposed. The measured equivalent thermal conductances of IR FPAs are consistent with the theoretical analysis results, which verifies the feasibility of this method.