Design and simulation of resistive SOI CMOS micro-heaters for high temperature gas sensors

This paper describes the design of doped single crystal silicon (SCS) microhotplates for gas sensors. Resistive heaters are formed by an n+/p+ implantation into a Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) wafer with a post-CMOS deep reactive ion etch to remove the silicon substrate. Hence they are fully compatible with CMOS technologies and allows for the integration of associated drive/detection circuitry. 2D electro-thermal models have been constructed and the results of numerical simulations using FEMLAB[reg] are given. Simulations show these micro-hotplates can operate at temperatures of 500 deg. C with a drive voltage of only 5 V and a power consumption of less than 100 mW