FABRICATION, CALIBRATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF MICRO-SCALE RESISTANCE TEMPERATURE DETECTORS

Abstract

Through this research, fabrication, calibration and characterization of micro-scale Resistance Temperature Detector (RTD) were studied. The RTD is meant to sense the temperature at the micro scale level on the hot spot of integrated circuit devices. Material that we focused in this study was indium tin oxide (ITO). Indium tin oxide thin films are widely used as an electrode owing to its optically transparent and electrical conducting properties. However, ITO thin film behavior as an RTD has not been well studied yet, which we aimed in this study. The commercially available ITO thin film deposited on a glass substrate was used in all the experiments. In addition, nickel which has a very linear temperature v/s resistance characteristic was also fabricated for comparison purpose. Nickel and ITO resistors were fabricated by standard microfabrication processes. Oil bath calibration process was implemented to maintain steady state temperature. The effect of annealing on the change in resistance of both ITO and nickel was studied. Experiments were carried out in different temperature ranges to validate the data. The study concludes that ITO thin film can be used as an RTD in a limited temperature range and its performance is highly affected by crystalline structure of ITO thin film layer.