Low-Power, Antifuse-Based Silicon Chemical Sensor on a Suspended Membrane

In this paper we describe a new, simple, and cheap silicon sensor operating at a high temperature of about 1000 K and consuming a very low power of a few milliwatts. We developed a silicon-processing compatible, simple, and low-cost method for processing thermally isolated suspended membranes. This makes the technology more compatible with standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor CMOS technology. The essential part of the device is a conductive link of several nanometers in size the so-called antifuse formed in between two polysilicon electrodes separated by a thin $SiO_2$ layer. An advantage of the proposed concept is decoupling i.e., independent control of the electrical and thermal resistances. The device can be utilized in chemical sensors or chemical microreactors requiring high temperature and very low power consumption, e.g., in portable battery-operated systems. As a direct application, we demonstrate a gas sensor i.e., Pellistor for hydrocarbons butane, methane, propane, etc. based on temperature changes due to the catalytic combustion of hydrocarbons. The power consumed by our device is about 2% of the power consumed by conventional Pellistors.