Uncooled Thermally Uninsulated Array Element Based on Thin Strontium Barium Niobate Pyroelectric Films

Modern multi-element IR arrays rely on the principle of maximum thermal insulation between the sensing element and the substrate with the required technology being complex and expensive. With the increase of array size technological demands regarding the quality of thermal insulation grow significantly. Current paper investigates a potentially beneficial approach to element production of a megapixel IR array element. It excludes the need for thermal insulation of the element and is based on the pyroelectric effect. By the means of a mathemm2 ·atical model, operation features of the proposed element were established. The model was verified experimentally on Sr
_1-x
Ba
_x
Nb
₂
O
₆
: La (x = 0.5) thin-film element prototypes with a pyroelectric coefficient, γ, reaching 1.4 ± 0.1 · 10
^-3
C/(m
²
· K).