| Novel emerging semiconductor technologies and applications are driving the MEMS devices to shrink in size. Packaging is an essential and integral part for a MEMS device, which impacts their overall cost, size, and performance. This calls for new packaging techniques to reduce the cost of packaging for MEMS devices, without deteriorating their performance. One such novel design for device-level encapsulation (self-packaged) of uncooled infrared (IR) microbolometers has been developed.; Device-level vacuum encapsulation has the potential to eliminate some major problems associated with the bolometer performance such as high thermal conductance of the ambient atmosphere, the high cost associated with conventional vacuum packaging, and the degradation of optical transmission at different wavelengths through a conventional package window. The device-level encapsulated bolometers can also be fabricated on flexible substrates, which have the advantage of conforming to non-planar surfaces compared to Si or other rigid substrates. In addition, a flexible superstrate with low shear stress has applications in robotics, aerospace, defense and biomedicine as a "Smart skin", a name given to multisensory arrays on conformal substrates to emulate human skin functions on inanimate objects. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
