Fabrication of Cantilever Absorber Structures for Enhanced Performance of Space-Based Far-Infrared Thermopile Detectors

Thermal radiometers are essential to space-based science observations, allowing one to extract valuable data contained in the infrared. Thermopile detectors are a class of uncooled thermal detectors that can offer several advantages for far-infrared (FIR) sensing over competing technologies such as bolometers. However, far-infrared thermopiles lack the format size of bolometers, resulting in limited spectral and spatial resolution. Increasing the absorber area of pixel units in the focal plane array is critical to improve detector sensitivity and increase the spatial resolution. We present here our recent fabrication efforts to increase the absorber area by fabricating a cantilever structure where the thermoelectric lines are under the structure.