Fabrication and performance of microbolometer arrays based on nanostructured vanadium oxide thin films

In this paper, 32 × 32 infrared (IR) uncooled focal plane arrays (UFPAs) based on nanostructured vanadium oxide (VOx) thermally sensitive material are fabricated by micromachining processes. The thermally sensitive element is fabricated on the complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) chip after planarization of its surface. In this paper, silicon dioxide is used as a buffer layer for fabrication of nanostructured VOx. The interconnection of the CMOS chip and the sensitive array is accomplished by electroless plating of nickel (Ni) metal, which shows good electrical conductivity performance. The IR sensitive testing results illustrate that the response of the microbolometer is obvious and the average responsivity and normalized detectivity are 1.26 × 104 V W−1 and 2.04 × 107 cm W−1 Hz1/2, respectively.