Room-Temperature Terahertz Antenna-Coupled Microbolometers with Titanium Thermistor and Heater

High-detectivity room-temperature terahertz (THz) detectors are expected to be utilized in spectroscopy and imaging for such applications as inspection for safety, nondestructive sensing in industry and construction, noninvasive examination for medicine and pharmacy. We have studied THz antenna-coupled bolometers with titanium (Ti) thermistor and heater fabricated on a high-resistivity silicon (Si) substrate with MEMS structures in order to develop uncooled high-performance sensors. In this paper, we report the study on design, electromagnetic (EM) and thermal simulation, fabrication, experiment of THz-wave measurement, and evaluation of performance for single-detector devices, by which large THz array detectors are easily developed. We have achieved good performance as low noise-equivalent power (NEP) of the orders of 10⁻¹¹ W/Hz^1/2 and response frequency of 5.5 kHz by studying a Ti thermistor with thin meander line for the THz antenna-coupled bolometer.