Negative Temperature Coefficient Thermistor with Multilayer Thin-film Structure AlN/VOx/AlN on Si(100) Substrate Chen-Hung Yen, Ing-Jiunn Su, and Hui-Huang Hsieh
(Received May 18, 2026; Accepted June 10, 2026)
Keywords: negative temperature coefficient thermistor, vanadium oxide, temperature coefficient of resistance, thermal time constant
We developed a thin-film thermistor constructed by stacking an AlN/VOx/AlN structure and a Ni/Al metal electrode. A silicon wafer with a <100> crystal face was used as a substrate, and reactive pulsed DC magnetron sputtering was used for all thin-film depositions in the thermistor. The energy dispersive spectrometry spectrum of field-emission Scanning Electron Microscope was used to identify the V-rich VOx thin film. Because of the high thermal conductivity of AlN and high temperature coefficient of resistance of VOx, the VOx negative temperature coefficient thermistor we constructed had a low process temperature of ~300 °C, resulting in good thermal cycle repeatability and excellent electrical properties: low resistivity of ~2.5 Ω-cm, high temperature coefficient of resistance of −2%/°C at 25 °C, low temperature time constant of 1.9 s, and acceptable thermal constant range from 1660 to 2551 K. A temperature signal reading of a thermistor based on an analog-to-digital converter circuit was also developed for temperature and thermal time constant measurements. In addition, the silicon substrate used is advantageous for readout integrated circuits owing to the silicon-based semiconductor process. The new thermistor developed in our research is low in cost and suitable for mass production via semiconductor process.
Corresponding author: Hui-Huang Hsieh