Multiphysics Co-Design of Optically Enhanced CMOS-SOI-MEMS Thermal-MOS Infrared Sensing Systems

The Thermal-MOS (TMOS) is an uncooled infrared detector invented at the Technion, utilizing a subthreshold MOSFET within a CMOS-SOI-MEMS platform to achieve highly sensitive thermal transduction. This thesis advances the TMOS architecture across two complementary domains: system-level characterization and device-level optical optimization.

At the sensing-system level, a novel perforated-screen grey-body methodology is introduced. This approach enables traceable radiometric validation across a wide range of emissivities and temperatures, establishing a robust, experimentally validated framework for detector characterization.

At the device level, a unified multiphysics framework jointly evaluates the optical, thermal, and mechanical behaviors of the wafer-level packaged sensing element. This framework identifies and resolves two critical optical bottlenecks—package reflection and incomplete absorption—by incorporating a moth-eye anti-reflection structure and an optimized meta-absorber.

Furthermore, a system-level scaling principle is established to quantitatively link component-level optical enhancements directly to detector responsivity and thermal time constants without requiring modifications to the underlying CMOS-SOI-MEMS fabrication platform.

Ph.D. student Under the supervision of Prof. Emeritus Yael Nemirovsky.