Thermal sensors cointegrated within a MEMS thermally actuated ultrathin membrane

This paper reports the simulation, design, fabrication and characterization of thermal sensors integrated into an ultrathin active MEMS membrane. Temperature detection is combined without any additional fabrication steps to thermal actuation. Mixing the actuation with a thermal measurement within the membrane allows us to monitor temperature during membrane deflection. Prototypes are fabricated using standard CMOS processes and a deep reactive ion etching process to release the membrane. Inner and outer actuation lead to large membrane deflection. Using such sensors, we extract the temperature profile of the thermally actuated membrane. A good fitting between finite element method simulation and characterization results validates the sensors. Finally, the optimal position of thermal sensors is extracted from this study.