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Updated: Oct 9, 2025

Thermal Measurement Techniques in Analytical Microfluidic Devices
Published on: June 3, 2015
A Thermopile Detector Based on Micro-Bridges for Heat Transfer
Na Zhou1,2, Xuefeng Ding3, Hongbo Li1,2
1Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
Abstract:
A thermopile detector with their thermocouples distributed in micro-bridges is designed and investigated in this work. The thermopile detector consists of 16 pairs of n-poly-Si/p-poly-Si thermocouples, which are fabricated using a low-cost, high-throughput CMOS process. The micro-bridges are realized by forming micro trenches at the front side first and then releasing the silicon substrate at the back side. Compared with a thermopile device using a continuous membrane, the micro-bridge-based one can achieve an improvement of the output voltage by 13.8% due to a higher temperature difference between the hot and cold junctions as there is a decrease in thermal conduction loss in the partially hollowed structure. This technique provides an effective way for developing high-performance thermopile detectors and other thermal devices.
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