Analysis of Electrothermal Integrated Circuits

Electrical and thermal interactions in silicon integrated circuits provide a means for realizing large effective time constants and, correspondingly, low cutoff frequencies in filters. This paper describes a method of analyzing the behavior of a general configuration of lumped or distributed heaters and sensors in an integrated circuit. The method yields results that are amenable to computer evaluation, and that also indicate how heaters and sensors should be shaped to obtain a particular type of response. A practical synthesis procedure is given for filter applications, and experimental results are presented that show close agreement with calculated values for examples of both analysis and synthesis of filters.