Aerogel isolated pyroelectric IR detector

Successful efforts to establish manufacturing of un-cooled infrared sensor arrays have been limited to complex structures with air or vacuum bridge thermal isolation for both bolometer and pyroelectric sensing elements. The complexity of these processes has resulted in low manufacturing yields and high cost devices. The process presented utilizes an aerogel layer under a pyroelectric capacitor to achieve the desired thermal isolation. The aerogel can be integrated with standard ferroelectric and CMOS processing that has been used for the commercialization of nonvolatile ferroelectric memory technology. Array structures have been fabricated with this process achieving pixel sizes from 50 μm by 50 μm to 6 μm by 6 μm. Data is shown verifying thin film performance of the capacitor over aerogel structure