Microheating elements in CMOS technology

The miniaturization of heating elements offers two distinct advantages over conventional heaters: their small size allows the rapid temperature transient control of a small surface, on the order of 1 ms, and array integration, enabling the configuration of a temperature programmable surface. Since many physical, biological, and chemical phenomena can be controlled by temperature, microheating elements have many interesting and potential applications. Integration of microheating elements with CMOS technology allows the monolithic circuit integration with the heaters for control, sensing, and signal processing. This manuscript is an overview of CMOS-based microheating elements realized by a anisotropic chemical etch after the full CMOS process is complete.