Fabrication of a ZnO Pyroelectric Sensor.docVIP

Sensors 2008, 8, 185-192 sensors ISSN 1424-8220 ? 2008 by MDPI /sensors Full Research Paper Fabrication of a ZnO Pyroelectric Sensor Chun-Ching Hsiao 1, Kuo-Yi Huang 2 and Yuh-Chung Hu 2,* 1 Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems Research Center, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan E-mail: cchsiao@.tw 2 Advanced Manufacturing Research Center, Department of Mechatronic Engineering, Huafan University, Taipei, Taiwan E-mail: kyhuang@.tw. E-mail: ychu@.tw * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ychu@.tw Received: 20 November 2007 / Accepted: 2 January 2008 / Published: 21 January 2008 Abstract: This paper proposes a two-step radio frequency (RF) sputtering process to form a ZnO film for pyroelectric sensors. It is shown that the two-step sputtering process with a lower power step followed by a higher power step can significantly improve the voltage responsivity of the ZnO pyroelectric sensor. The improvement is attributed mainly to the formation of ZnO film with a strongly preferred orientation towards the c-axis. Furthermore, a nickel film deposited onto the uncovered parts of the ZnO film can effectively improve the voltage responsivity at higher modulating frequencies since the nickel film can enhance the incident energy absorption of the ZnO layer. Keywords: pyroelectric sensor, thin film deposition, ZnO. 1. Introduction Thin-film pyroelectric sensors have been successfully used in many applications, such as pollution monitoring, hot image detector, intruder alarm, and gas analysis [1-4]. They possess the advantages of being integrable with on-chip circuitry, un-cooled detecting, room-temperature operation, fast and wide spectral response with high sensitivity and low cost [2, 4-5]. The principle of thin-film ZnO pyroelectric sensors is based on the pyroelectric effect to convert the temperature variation to the corresponding electrical signal. The dyn