A sub-circuit model of a microbolometer IR detector and its experimental validation

In this paper, we present a generic circuit model of microbolometer Infrared detector that can be used to simulate the electrical and thermal performance of microbolometers using SPICE like circuit simulator. Using this model, we have studied the effects of various parameters on the microbolometer performance by simulations in PSPICE for its verification. We have validated the model with the performance of our titanium microbolometers being developed at our laboratory. We have tuned the model parameters for these microbolometers and have shown that the simulated performance agrees with the measured performance reasonably well with the variety of measurement condition. The validated model has been used to fine tune the design of our titanium microbolometers as it allows us to monitor some internal parameters also that are not easy to measure in practical devices, like instantaneous temperature of microbolometer for a varying IR intensity falling on it. The proposed model is generic and therefore, using similar procedure it may be used for other types of microbolometers also like amorphous-Si based, vanadium oxide based etc., once it is validated for that.