Design, simulation, and performance evaluation of a high temperature and low power consumption microheater structure for mos gas sensors

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to design, simulate, and to evaluate the performance of a low power microheater for a gas sensing system. A microheater is a microstructure incorporated in a MOS gas sensor in order to elevate the temperature of the sensor to an operating range for the reliable performance of a gas sensor. An approach is made in this work to find an optimized microheater structure by considering different membrane sizes and geometries and taking into account the temperature distribution and power consumption problems. The materials used for the analysis are Platinum and Polysilicon. After analyzing various microheater designs, a novel design is developed by optimization and varying geometry, layer dimension, and materials of the device. For the developed design, thermal profile and power consumption analysis are carried out. The entire work is carried out in COMSOL MULTIPHYSICS 4.2