Surface-micromachined Bragg Reflectors Based on Multiple Airgap/SiO2 Layers for CMOS-compatible Fabry-perot Filters in the UV-visible Spectral Range

In CMOS-compatible optical filter designs, SiO2 is often used as the low-index material, limiting the optical contrast (nHi/nLo) to about 2. Using the air as low-index material improves the optical contrast by about 50%, thus increasing the reflectivity and bandwidth at a given design complexity. The design and fabrication of a 4-layered air...

A Lossy Fabry-perot Based Optical Filter for Natural Gas Analysis

A set-up for optical gas composition measurement based on absorption spectroscopy is composed of a white light source, a gas cell and a spectrometer. The Fabry-Perot optical filter is suitable for miniaturization of this system, as it is composed of only two reflectors with a transparent layer in-between. Varying the width of this optical...

A Miniaturized Optical Sensor with Integrated Gas Cell

The design, fabrication and characterization of a highly integrated optical gas sensor is presented. The gas cell takes up most of the space in a microspectrometer and is the only component that has so far not been miniaturized. Using the tapered resonator cavity of a linear variable optical filter as a gas cell enables ultimate miniaturization,...

Vapour HF release of airgap-based UV-visible optical filters

The design and CMOS-compatible fabrication of airgap-based optical filters in a surface micromachining process with sacrificial release using thevapour phase is presented. An airgap-dielectric layer combination offers a higher refractive index contrast, as compared to the conventional all-dielectriclayer based filters, which results in a higher...

Design and fabrication of 45° inclined mirrors for wafer-level optical absorption spectroscopy

The increasing demand for small, robust and low-cost gas sensors triggers the batch fabrication of highly selective and sensitive miniaturized devices. A linear variable optical filter (LVOF) based microspectrometer enables selectivity in a wide wavelength range, while maintaining the robustness and low cost. To achieve sensitivity in an LVOF...

Compact gas cell integrated with a linear variable optical filter

A miniaturized methane (CH4) sensor based on nondispersiveinfrared absorption is realized in MEMS technology. A high level offunctional integration is achieved by using the resonance cavity of a linearvariable optical filter (LVOF) also as a gas absorption cell. For effectivedetection of methane at λ = 3.39 µm, an absorption path length of at...

Implementation of CMOS-compatible Metamaterial Absorber for gas Sensing Application

The design of a metamaterial-based absorber for use in a mid-IR microspectrometer-based gas sensor is reported.The microspectrometer consists of a linear variable optical filter (LVOF) that is aligned with an array of thermopiledetectors, which is fabricated on a SiN membrane and covered with the absorber. Special emphasis was put on theCMOS...

A miniaturized optical gas sensor for natural gas analysis

The depletion of domestic reserves and the growing use of sustainable resources forces a transition from the locally produced natural gas with a well-known composition toward the ‘new’ gas with a more flexible composition in the Netherlands. For safe combustion and proper billing, the natural gas must be monitored at both distribution points and...

Fabrication Tolerance Sensitivity in Large-Area Mid-Infrared Metamaterial Absorbers

Metamaterial absorbers are photonic structures composed of an array of sub-wavelength metallic patterns. Results in literature are usually based on structures of nominal dimensions, despite the significant effect of fabrication tolerances on performance. This research aims to identify the main sources of uncertainty and to investigate their...

Functionalizing a Tapered Microcavity as a Gas Cell for On-Chip Mid-Infrared Absorption Spectroscopy

Increasing demand for field instruments designed to measure gas composition has strongly promoted the development of robust, miniaturized and low-cost handheld absorption spectrometers in the mid-infrared. Efforts thus far have focused on miniaturizing individual components. However, the optical absorption path that the light beam travels...