Design and fabrication of optimized gold micro-heater and comparison of its performance with platinum micro-heater

With the development of microelectronics and micromachining technology, micro-heater has found plenty of applications in micro-sensor. Heating electrode material is one of the key factors which affect the power loss, response time and sensitivity of the micro-heater. In this paper, two micro-heaters with same geometry using two various metals have been design, fabricated and characterize on silicon substrate based on micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) fabrication process. In the first micro-heater, gold and in the second micro-heater, platinum are used as heating electrode, and the effect of heating electrode material on the performance of micro-heater is evaluated. Moreover, to improve micro-heaters efficiency, their design is investigated and the micro-heater with optimum design is chosen. The analytical results exhibit that gold micro-hater has lower response time and higher power loss than platinum micro-heater. The experimental results are in good agreement with the results obtained from the analytical analysis and show that fabricated micro-heaters with optimum design have high performance; as power consumption and response time are 36mW and 1.75ms respectively in gold micro-heater and 30mW and 2.1ms respectively in platinum micro-heater for the temperature variation from 30oC to 450oC. These results demonstrate that with fabrication of gold micro-heater response time improve 16.6% in comparison with platinum micro-heater.