Precision Temperature Control of Microsystems using On-Package Heaters and Sensors

High-precision applications require stable operating environments for the components, with temperature stability often being the most critical requirement. Existing methods for temperature control rely on a combination of device level (i.e., on-die) and system level (i.e., board and enclosure) temperature control and shielding to achieve the necessary temperature stability. However, device-level solutions offer little post-fabrication flexibility, and board/enclosure-level solutions add to system bulk and power consumption. Herein, we demonstrate a simple, widely applicable method of using on-package heaters and sensors for temperature control. Various configurations of surface-mount heaters and sensors were arranged around a standard ceramic package. A simple proportional-integral temperature controller was developed and used for the integrated temperature control. We demonstrate that the method achieves similar accuracies to having an on-die sensor, and hence, is easily applicable to many high-performance sensing applications. We further show that a temperature stability of ~1mK is possible with a power consumption of ~500mW.