Fabrication of thermal-based vacuum gauge

Ho Jung; Tae Hyun Kim; Kyung Tae Kim; Jae Hong Park; Hee Yeoun Kim

Fabrication of thermal-based vacuum gauge

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Author(s): Ho Jung ¹ ; Tae Hyun Kim ¹ ; Kyung Tae Kim ¹ ; Jae Hong Park ¹ ; Hee Yeoun Kim ¹
- Affiliations: 1: National Nano Fab Center, 335 Gwahangro Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
Source: Volume 9, Issue 12, December 2014, p. 835 – 840
DOI: 10.1049/mnl.2014.0378 , Online ISSN 1750-0443

Received 29/06/2014, Accepted 30/10/2014, Revised 23/10/2014, Published 15/12/2014

The fabrication and evaluation of a wide-range vacuum gauge for monitoring the pressure level inside an infrared focal plane array and a wafer-level packaging (WLP) are reported. The proposed vacuum gauge has a microbolometer structure produced using the conventional surface micromachining process to achieve thermal isolation and high sensitivity. This structure has other advantages such as fast response time, a wider measurement range and easier integration to a Si substrate compared with other pressure sensors. The evaluation results show that the fabricated vacuum gauge has a linear dynamic range and a sensitivity of 10⁻³ to 10⁵ K/W/torr for vacuum pressures ranging from 10⁻⁶ to 760 torr. Also, the response time to vacuum change is reduced from 0.11 s at 10⁻⁵ torr to 15 ms at 100 torr. Therefore, the microbolometer-based vacuum gauge has good potential for application in WLP, and it is possible to hermetically seal it with various read-out integrated circuit substrates.

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