A Performance Enhancement Method for Thermopile Sensors Using a Chip Probe Test System

In this work, a conventional chip probe test system is not only adopted to evaluate functionality of thermopile sensors, but is also utilized to integrate ink dots on the devices. Compared with a pristine sensor, such devices integrated with ink dots are able to increase output by >200% in a wavelength range of 635-1550 nm, and by >40% in a temperature range of 30-450 ℃. Moreover, the size of the ink dots can be well controlled in an 8-inch wafer, and the performance enhancement ability of this simple and low-cost approach has a satisfactory uniformity, thus it has great potential in mass preparation of thermopile sensors with high performance.