Design, fabrication and applications of MEMS tunable blazed gratings

Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology originated from the integrated circuits (IC) industry, and has gradually evolved into a wide range of technologies across multiple disciplines in three decades. With the boom of the IT industry in the late 1990's, micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS) or optical MEMS technology, a branch of MEMS, has rapidly been applied to a large variety of fields including optical telecommunications, information display, spectroscopy and medical imaging.; In this dissertation, we focus on optical filtering technology based on diffractive optical MEMS, which manipulate the light by modulating its phase through micro-actuation, or sense mechanical and other physical property changes at the microscale based on the principles of diffractive optics. The fundamental trade-off between the average transmission power and complexity of diffractive optical filters leads us to the concept of tunable blazed gratings, which trade spectral complexity for power transmission efficiency. MEMS tunable blazed gratings (TBG) are blazed gratings whose individual elements can be actuated at the micro-level using MEMS actuators. The TBG not only possess the advantages of high transmission and large dispersion of traditional blazed gratings, but also have the potential to enable novel optical filtering functionality beyond the reach of conventional monolithic blazed gratings with a much larger number of degrees of freedom.; Starting from the first principles of diffractive optics, we develop the theoretical understanding of tunable blazed gratings, which serves as guidelines to our design and fabrication of TBG. We show different generations of TBG designs and the corresponding fabrication processes and focus on one the ones based on SOI technology which combine anisotropic wet silicon etching that defines mirror surface on crystalline surfaces of silicon, and deep reactive ion etching that can flexibly define electrostatic actuators. We demonstrate tunable optical filters and de/multiplexer applications and show examples of potential applications including multi-free-spectral-range spectroscopy and tunable external cavity lasers.