Monolithic Integration of Plasmonic Meta-Material Absorber with CMOS-MEMs Infrared Sensor for Responsivity Enhancement and Human Detection Application

This study monolithically integrates a metal-insulator-metal-based (MIM) plasmonic metamaterial absorber (PMA) with a thermoelectric (TE) infrared (IR) sensor using standard TSMC CMOS platform. The proposed design extends the strip-via releasing hole structure in [1] to further integrate MIM absorber with TE IR sensor. Such design exhibits three merits: (1) the line width requirement of MIM absorber is achieved by CMOS process, (2) the absorption peaks of MIM absorbers can be modulated by pattern designs in the epsilon-near-pole region, and (3) the MIM absorbers can be designed to broaden the absorption spectrum of IR sensor. In application, the absorption spectrum of IR sensor is designed within $8-14\mu \mathrm{m}$ in this study for human detection application. Measurement result demonstrates the integration of MIM absorber and IR sensor can achieve 21% responsivity improvement and the measured absorption spectrum matches with simulation.