Infrared Physics & Technology xxx (2012) xxxxxx

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Infrared Physics & Technology

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PSPICE circuit simulation of microbolometer infrared detectors with noise sources

Raghvendra Sahai Saxena , Arun Panwar, S.K. Semwal, P.S. Rana, Sudha Gupta, R.K. Bhan
Solid State Physics Laboratory, Defence R&D Organization, Lucknow Road, Timarpur, Delhi-110054, India

h i g h l i g h t s
" Development of sub-circuit model of an electro-thermal device.
" Inclusion of different noise sources with user dened spectral content.
" Verication and simulation of noise sources.
" Complete circuit simulation in different network congurations of the sub-circuit.

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 18 January 2012
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
Circuit simulation
Infrared
Microbolometer
Noise
Sub-circuit model
Thermal detector

a b s t r a c t
In this paper, we present a method of incorporating various types of noise in circuit simulation of a microbolometer infrared detector to analyze the effect of noise on its performance. This ability of simulating
electro-thermal performance of microbolometers in circuit simulation platform along with their noise
performance allows designing of its suitable readout integrated circuit (ROIC). Being an electro-thermal
device, a microbolometer has both the electrical and thermal components interacting with each other.
Therefore, the noise sources existing in standard circuit simulators cannot predict the noise of a microbolometer correctly. Disturbances coming from the background radiation, device temperature uctuations,
icker noise and the Johnson noise etc. contribute in the total noise of a microbolometer element. All these
components of noise can be incorporated using the proposed simulation technique. The technique also
allows modifying the frequency response of the noise in simulations as per the user dened noise spectrum, making it suitable for any type of microbolometer.
2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
MEMS (Microelectromechanical systems) based resistive microbolometers, in spite of being less sensitive; provide an attractive
alternative for IR (Infrared) detection and imaging in many commercial applications as they provide advantages of room temperature
operation capability, compactness, small size, ruggedness, less
weight and low cost as compared to the high performance cooled
detectors. The performance of these detectors is governed by the
thermal parameters like temperature coefcient of resistance, TCR
(a), thermal conductance of the support structure from element to
the substrate (GTh), thermal capacity (CTh) and time constant (sTh)
[18]. However, the ultimate sensitivity depends on the total noise
[4,810]. It is therefore important to consider the noise performance
also while designing the electro-thermal parameters of a microbolometer detector array.
For realization of a 2D IR imager, the microbolometer arrays are
grown over the read out integrated circuit (ROIC) designed and
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: rs_saxena@yahoo.com (R.S. Saxena).

optimized to match with the microbolometer detector array performance. Therefore, to achieve a desired level of imaging performance, the detector array needs to be designed along with the
ROIC for proper consideration of their performance interdependence. This involves the multi-domain simulations consisting of
the device processing, thermal, electrical and circuit simulations
etc., requiring multiple platforms having proper interface among
them. This makes the design of thermal imager complicated and
time-consuming. To avoid the requirement of multiple simulation
platforms, we propose to use sub-circuit model of the detector so
that its electro-thermal performance can be simulated while simulating the ROIC on any circuit simulator like PSPICE.
Recently, we developed a generic sub-circuit model of microbolometer suitable for its response simulations in various possible
bias conditions [11]. The schematic diagram of the model is reproduced here in Fig. 1a with independent access to both of its terminals (instead of grounding one terminal, as in original Ref. [11]).
The independent access of the terminals makes the model suitable
for any type of circuit connections. The PSPICE implementation of
the model is also shown in Fig. 1b with some typical values
of various parameters. We demonstrated that the model was good

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infrared.2012.07.004

Please cite this article in press as: R.S. Saxena et al., PSPICE circuit simulation of microbolometer infrared detectors with noise sources, Infrared Phys. Technol. (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infrared.2012.07.004

R.S. Saxena et al. / Infrared Physics & Technology xxx (2012) xxxxxx

Fig. 1a. Sub-circuit model of microbolometer to simulate the response.

Fig. 1b. PSPICE circuit representing the microbolometer response model.

enough for the systematic signal simulations and also validated

that with the experimental data. However, it is lacking in noise
performance simulation and therefore in estimation of the most
important detector specication, i.e., specic detectivity (D). Also,
the matching of ROIC and optimization of microbolometer operating conditions for best performance is decided by the noise to a
large extent. But unfortunately, there is no easy way to customize
the noise sources in the conventional circuit simulation methods as
there exist a variety of noise sources, limiting the overall detector
sensitivity.
In this paper, we give a brief description of the noise sources
and implementation of their effects in the microbolometer sub-circuit model in such a way that all such noise inputs may be incorporated appropriately and thus, we augment our earlier proposed
sub-circuit microbolometer model by incorporating noise simulation capability into it. A brief description of various noise sources

and the requirement to include them in simulation is discussed

in Section 2. The implementation of noise sources is discussed in
Section 3. In Section 4, we present the simulations and verication
of the complete sub-circuit model. For verication we compared
the noise simulation results with the measurement results of our
titanium microbolometer, being developed at our laboratory
[1,57,11]. Finally, we conclude the work in Section 5.

2. The noise sources in microbolometers

The total noise in a microbolometer IR imager is categorized as
background noise, detector noise and the readout noise. Since our
target is to represent the detector as a sub-circuit, the main focus is
to model the noise sources that are not available in the circuit simulators, i.e., the background noise and detector noise. The major

Please cite this article in press as: R.S. Saxena et al., PSPICE circuit simulation of microbolometer infrared detectors with noise sources, Infrared Phys. Technol. (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infrared.2012.07.004

R.S. Saxena et al. / Infrared Physics & Technology xxx (2012) xxxxxx
Table 1
Equations of different types of noises and their effect on D. All the symbols have their
usual meaning, as described in Ref. [10].
Type of noise

Mean noise square voltage,

Detectivity, D

V 2N
Background radiation noise

8krgAT 5D T 5S R2 xDf

1=2

temperature uctuations may be implemented as a random voltage source connected in series with the temperature equivalent
node of the microbolometer sub-circuit. The effective noise bandwidth of detector temperature uctuations is decided by the equivalent thermal lter composed by the thermal capacitance and
thermal conductance of the microbolometer.

8krT 5S T 5D Df

Temperature uctuation
noise
Johnson noise

4kGT R2 xDf
4kTRDf

agIRA
G4kT1x2 s2 1=2

Flicker noise

K f V b Df
fY

agIRADf 1=2
GK f V b 1x2 s2 1=2

gA1=2
2TkG1=2

2.3. Johnson noise

1=2

sources of detector noise are the detector temperature uctuations,

Johnson noise and the icker noise. The relations of these noise
sources with the physical parameters and their effect on the detector performance are listed in Table 1. A brief description of these
noise sources and their implementation strategies are discussed
in the following sub-sections.
2.1. Background radiation noise
The background uctuations are unavoidable and uncontrolled
for the detector designer. Thus, a detector having background limited performance is considered to be the best possible detector.
Practically, the other noise sources put limit on the detector performance and therefore, background uctuation is not a dominant
factor of the total noise. Though it is not well predictable, it is expected to be absolutely random in nature. In simulations, a random
noise voltage source is therefore required for implementation of
background radiation noise. For its implementation, the average
background radiation falling on the detector needs to be modeled
as a constant current source and should be calibrated using blackbody radiation. This is also required to set the resistance of the element at stated conditions. The random variation over that
background condition may then be used to model the background
radiation noise by using a uniform random noise current generator
connected in parallel with the background current source. Thus, a
constant current source equivalent to the background radiation
and a random current source equivalent to the variations in the
background radiation are required to realize the background radiation noise.
2.2. Detector temperature uctuation noise
The microbolometer is basically a temperature dependant resistor. Any uctuation in its temperature directly gets transformed
into the output noise. Although the IR FPA of microbolometer is
usually kept at a temperature stabilized platform (off the package/inside the package), controlled using a thermo electric cooler
(TEC) and a PID controller, yet a little amount of temperature uctuations are still unavoidable. Also, recently TEC less microbolometer IR FPAs are becoming popular. Therefore, the temperature
uctuation induced noise in the element cannot be ignored and
needs a model to predict the performance so as to design the system accordingly. The thermal capacity, CTh inuences the temperature uctuation noise because, by its denition, it is a measure
of the change in temperature for a given amount of heat supplied
to it. Therefore, while designing the microbolometer element one
can tune the value of CTh to be at higher side for lower temperature
uctuations. However, CTh also decides the thermal time constant,
sTh. Therefore, a circuit model with temperature uctuation noise
is required to properly set the thermal response time. Temperature
is also expected to change randomly in a limit and therefore, the

The Johnson noise is one of the major noise sources in microbolometers as a microbolometer is nothing but a resistor. In metal
lm microbolometers, where icker noise is usually very less, it
is the only important contributor of the total noise. Not only in metal microbolometers, but in semiconductor microbolometers also
the Johnson noise is a major noise source because of their high
resistance, typically in mega ohms range. The magnitude of Johnson noise follows its standard relation here also. The noise bandwidth here is the measurement bandwidth, other parameters of
Johnson noise are constant and therefore this relation directly
gives the value of voltage uctuations that can be implemented
as a random voltage source connected in series (or as a random
current source connected in parallel) with the element.
2.4. Flicker noise
The icker noise is a low frequency noise, rising basically due to
the non-ideal conditions of the material surface and interface,
which is very important and limiting factor in semiconductor
materials. Thus, it is the dominant noise source in semiconductor
microbolometers. The expression of icker noise is standard and
may be implemented as a random voltage source connected in series with the element. Although the microbolometer elements, in
large format IR FPA of present day technology, are operated at high
frequency to get appropriate frame rates, yet at the time of integrating the signal on ROIC capacitor, they are affected by the icker
noise. The icker noise bandwidth is therefore decided by the integration time.
3. Sub-circuit implementation of noise sources
As discussed in the previous section, the noise is basically a random variation in the voltage or current at various nodes or the
branches of circuit. The sources of these random variations can
be of various types and their implementation requires random
voltage sources (or random current sources), with user dened
mean and variation. Generating such kind of controlled random
values as a function of time steps is not possible in usual circuitsimulation environments. Therefore interlink is required between
the random sequence generator and the simulator. This we have
achieved by using a special source VPWL_FILE (or IPWL_FILE)
available in PSPICE (OrCAD16.2). This source accepts the time
stamps and the corresponding voltage (or current) values written
sequentially line by line in a text-mode le. Using this feature
we can bring random numbers in simulation environment in the
form of voltage (or current) values at the specied time points generated separately using any programming language [12]. Thus, in
transient simulations having the same time steps as that of the
random number time points, we get the effect of noise in circuit.
Fig. 2a shows the complete sub-circuit model of a microbolometer element along with the noise sources, icker noise (v1/f), Johnson noise (vJn), temperature uctuations (vtemp) and background
radiation noise (irad). Here, left side port represents the microbolometer terminal nodes, whereas other nodes, including right side
port are internal. Except the icker noise, all other dominant noises
have at frequency responses, i.e., like white noise. The PSPICE

Please cite this article in press as: R.S. Saxena et al., PSPICE circuit simulation of microbolometer infrared detectors with noise sources, Infrared Phys. Technol. (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infrared.2012.07.004

R.S. Saxena et al. / Infrared Physics & Technology xxx (2012) xxxxxx

Fig. 2a. Proposed complete sub-circuit model of microbolometer including the noise sources.

Fig. 2b. PSPICE circuit representing the complete sub-circuit model of microbolometer.

realization of the proposed circuit is shown in Fig. 2b. As shown in

the gure, we have generated different sets of random numbers for
each sources as per the standard algorithms [12] and imported
them in simulations as text les. We veried these sources by actually generating that noise using the arbitrary waveform generator
AFG3252 of Tektronix and analyzing the same using Tektronix
oscilloscope TDS754D, as shown in Fig. 3 for typical case of icker
noise. Similarly, we ensured the spectrum of other noise sources
also by their FFT analysis. We also ensured that the random numbers representing different noise sources are uncorrelated by
investigating the correlation coefcients. To accommodate a broad
band of frequencies, we have added noise sources in the frequency

range from 10 Hz to 1 MHz, considering the fact that in most of the

practical cases the noise bandwidth remains within this frequency
band and nally, we scaled those set of random numbers in the
PSPICE to match the expected rms values of the corresponding
noises of different sources.
4. Verication of noise simulation
4.1. Verication of noise sources
To verify the behavior of noise sources, we took an example
case of a metal microbolometer element (with 3.3 kX resistance

Please cite this article in press as: R.S. Saxena et al., PSPICE circuit simulation of microbolometer infrared detectors with noise sources, Infrared Phys. Technol. (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infrared.2012.07.004

R.S. Saxena et al. / Infrared Physics & Technology xxx (2012) xxxxxx

Fig. 3. FFT analysis of the icker noise generated by arbitrary waveform generator
AFG3252.
Fig. 5. Simulated signal for different thermal capacitances for chopped radiations of
20 Hz chopping frequency.

and 0.27% TCR) and rst veried their noise free response, as done
in our previous work [11]. Then we placed the noise sources at
appropriate places in the sub-circuit and examined the noise performance at various internal nodes and terminal nodes. Finally,
we have simulated the element response along with the noise
sources by varying the generated noise values for variety of design
parameter conditions. Fig. 4 shows the noise simulated by placing
an ideal band pass lter at the output for different values of 1/f
noise factor, nf [1,4,5]. Fig. 5 shows the effect of varying thermal
capacitance CTh on the signal and noise. Due to high time constant
the output is not able to follow the pulsed optical input and this
effect becomes increasingly prominent when the thermal capacitance increases. High thermal capacitance also results in the reduced noise bandwidth and therefore lesser noise. This effect is
also evident in Fig. 5 and thus veries the model formulations.
4.2. Noise simulation of networked microbolometers
Another important consideration was the behavior of the proposed sub-circuit model in variety of circuit congurations, which
is important from the ROIC circuit simulation point of view. We
veried the suitability of the proposed model to simulate any networked conguration of the microbolometer elements by constructing series and parallel combinations of the elements and
veried the equivalent resistance and noise distributions.
For an extensive test of network connection capability of this
model, we constructed a 4  4 array of the proposed microbolome-

Fig. 4. Simulated noise spectrum of microbolometer sub-circuit (having parameters

of a typical titanium microbolometer) with different icker noise factor.

ter sub-circuits as shown schematically in Fig. 6a. Here, each circle

represents a detector element, i.e., the sub-circuit shown in Fig. 1b.
The elements of electrically identical conditions are grouped in
three zones, indicated as zone-1, zone-2 and zone-3 in Fig. 6a.
The noise of an element may be modeled as a current source, generating equivalent noise current, connected in parallel with the
element. In an area array structure, a particular element will pass
the noise current not only of its own, but also the effective noise
currents of all other elements. In our earlier work [5,13,14], we
investigated in detail that in an area array of equal resistances
the current is distributed in all the elements over the whole network in a specic ratio, reproduced here as follows:

I1 : I2 : I3 2N  1 : N  1 : 1

Here I1, I2 and I3 are the currents owing in the elements of zone-1,
zone-2 and zone-3 respectively. To investigate this behavior in our
simulations, we kept only one element with noise sources
incorporated, having sub-circuit of Fig. 2b. The total noise generated
in noisy element is shown schematically as a current source,
generating equivalent noise current, connected in parallel with
the element.
The zone-wise noise distribution in this networked array is
shown in Fig. 6b. The simulated noise of a single pixel without net-

Fig. 6a. Schematic of networked 4  4 microbolometer array [5,11] with each circle
representing a detector element.

Please cite this article in press as: R.S. Saxena et al., PSPICE circuit simulation of microbolometer infrared detectors with noise sources, Infrared Phys. Technol. (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infrared.2012.07.004

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readout circuit. We veried its suitability for any kind of circuit

connection by simulating the 4  4 networked array. This circuit
model is therefore suited for the design of compatible ROIC. It
may also be used to estimate and optimize the overall performance
of microbolometer based IR imager.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Director SSPL, Dr. R. Muralidharan,
for his support, motivation and encouragement to carry out this
work and granting permission to publish it. Authors are also grateful to the fabrication team whose ROIC simulation requirement has
motivated this activity.
References
Fig. 6b. The bar chart showing the simulated noise of a single pixel without
network and that of the networked elements of different zones, shown in Fig. 6a.

work was 10 nV/Hz1/2. When it was connected in the 4  4 network conguration of Fig. 6a, the distributed noise current was
found to be almost in the same ratio shown in Eq. (1). Thus, the distribution of noise follows the standard theory, verifying the model.
We also veried these results against noise measurements of
16  16 networked arrays of titanium microbolometers.
Furthermore, the noise currents are added up in quadrature,
resulting in the apparent noise current of a particular element to
be the rms value of all the noise current components owing
through it. Thus, for the case of equal noise in all the elements of
N  N array, the measured noise current will therefore become
(2N1)1/2/N times of actual noise current as discussed in our earlier work [5]. To verify this behavior we kept all elements noisy
(with noise current of 3.42 nV/Hz1/2) in networked arrays of
4  4 and 16  16 conguration in simulations and found that
the simulated noise in networked conguration becomes
6.65 nV/Hz1/2 and 3.42 nV/Hz1/2 closely following the predicted
theory. This veries the proposed noise model and simulations.
5. Conclusions
We presented sub-circuit model that includes various types of
noise sources of a microbolometer IR detector. The effect of each
individual noise source has been veried using circuit simulation
in PSPICE. Also, the proposed technique is quite generic and any
other noise source may also be implemented with the similar technique. The incorporation of the noise in microbolometer sub-circuit model makes it suitable for the circuit simulation with the

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Please cite this article in press as: R.S. Saxena et al., PSPICE circuit simulation of microbolometer infrared detectors with noise sources, Infrared Phys. Technol. (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infrared.2012.07.004