title: Development of micro-heaters with optimized temperature compensation design for gas sensors.
abstract: One of the key components of a chemical gas sensor is a MEMS micro-heater. Micro-heaters are used in both semiconductor gas sensors and NDIR gas sensors; however they each require different heat dissipation characteristics. For the semiconductor gas sensors, a uniform temperature is required over a wide area of the heater. On the other hand, for the NDIR gas sensor, the micro-heater needs high levels of infrared radiation in order to increase sensitivity. In this study, a novel design of a poly-Si micro-heater is proposed to improve the uniformity of heat dissipation on the heating plate. Temperature uniformity of the micro-heater is achieved by compensating for the variation in power consumption around the perimeter of the heater. With the power compensated design, the uniform heating area is increased by 2.5 times and the average temperature goes up by 40 °C. Therefore, this power compensated micro-heater design is suitable for a semiconductor gas sensor. Meanwhile, the poly-Si micro-heater without compensation shows a higher level of infrared radiation under equal power consumption conditions. This indicates that the micro-heater without compensation is more suitable for a NDIR gas sensor. Furthermore, the micro-heater shows a short response time of less than 20 ms, indicating a very high efficiency of pulse driving.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of NID Fusion Technology, Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Gongneung-Dong, Nowon-Gu, Seoul 139-743, Korea. hwj3237@naver.com
authors.forename: Woo-Jin
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Hwang
authors.forename: Kyu-Sik
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Shin
authors.forename: Ji-Hyoung
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Roh
authors.forename: Dae-Sung
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Sung-Hoon
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Choa
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004560:Electricity; D004867:Equipment Design; D020342:Finite Element Analysis; D005740:Gases / Q000032:analysis*; D006361:Heating / Q000295:instrumentation*; D007259:Infrared Rays; D055617:Micro-Electrical-Mechanical Systems / Q000295:instrumentation*; D009716:Numerical Analysis, Computer-Assisted; D013696:Temperature
chemical_list: D005740:Gases