Abstract
This study presents the design of thermocouples to enhance the detectivity of thermoelectric (TE) infrared (IR) sensor. The IR sensor is implemented using the standard TSMC CMOS processes. Merits of the design include: (1) to enlarge the width of thermocouple to minimize the influence of thermal noise, (2) no need to change the existing structure design. The proposed design is shown in Fig. 1. The IR sensor with higher detectivity (which means its easier for signal processing) is a design target. Measurement results demonstrate the proposed IR sensor can achieve 21.7% detectivity improvement and sustain the responsivity within 8.4% decrease in total. It indicates that this simple approach can successfully enhance the total performance of TE IR sensor.