Maintaining transparency of a heated MEMs membrane for enabling long-term optical measurements on soot-containing exhaust gas

Ensuring optical transparency over a wide spectral range of a window with a view into the tailpipe of the combustion engine, while it is exposed to the harsh environment of sootcontaining exhaust gas, is an essential pre-requisite for introducing optical techniques for long-term monitoring of automotive emissions. Therefore, a regenerable...

CMOS-compatible mid-IR metamaterial absorbers for out-of-band suppression in optical MEMS

The design and fabrication of wideband mid-infrared metamaterial absorbers are presented. The emphasis is put on the shape-tolerant design for using masked UV (i-line) lithography and CMOS-compatible fabrication to enable on-chip co-integration with detector and readout circuits in a MEMS foundry while maintaining wafer throughput. The...

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...

Combining impedance spectroscopy with optical absorption spectroscopy in the UV for biofuel composition measurement

A capacitive probe is generally used in a flex-fuel engine for measuring the ethanol content in biofuel. However, the water content in biofuel of high ethanol content cannot be disregarded or considered constant and the full composition measurement of ethanol, gasoline and water in biofuel is required. Electrical impedance spectroscopy with a...

Optical Spectroscopy for Biofuel Composition Sensing

The optical absorption of water-containing bio-fuel is investigated as a parameter to determine the gasoline content of this fuel. Optical measurements reveal that gasoline shows an interesting and useful spectrum with typical absorption behavior in the UV range between 230 and 300 nm. This result indicates that significant information can be...

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,...

Optical Filter for Providing the Required Illumination to Enable Narrow Band Imaging

This paper presents the design, fabrication and characterization of two Fabry Perot type optical filters (415 nm and 540 nm) for enabling Narrow Band Imaging (NBI) in medical devices (MD). The two-colour illumination should satisfy a highly specific optical design, which is composed of a thin-film optical filter stack of titanium dioxide (TiO2)...

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...

IR Microspectrometers based on Linear-Variable Optical Filters

This paper presents the design, fabrication and characterization of Infra-Red (IR) Linear Variable Optical Filter (LVOF)-based micro-spectrometers. Two LVOF microspectrometer designs have been realized: one for operating in the 1400 nm to 2500 nm wavelength range and another between 3000 nm and 5000 nm. The IR LVOFs have been fabricated in an IC...

Design and implementation of a sub-nm resolution microspectrometer based on a Linear-Variable Optical Filter

In this paper the concept of a microspectrometer based on a Linear Variable Optical Filter (LVOF) for operation in the visible spectrum is presented and used in two different designs: the first is for the narrow spectral band between 610 nm and 680 nm, whereas the other is for the wider spectral band between 570 nm and 740 nm. Design...

Design and Fabrication of an Albedo Insensitive Analog Sun Sensor

A sun sensor is usually included in a satellite for optically measuring the position relative to the sun. The accuracy of a conventional sun sensor is affected by reflected sunlight at the nearby earth atmosphere: the albedo radiation. The part of the spectrum at near IR (1.5 ?m) is not included in the albedo radiation, due to the high water...

Narrow-band pass filter array for integrated opto-electronic spectroscopy detectors to assess esophageal tissue

A strategy for spectroscopy tissue diagnosis using a small number of wavelengths is reported. The feasibility to accurately quantify tissue information using only 16 wavelengths is demonstrated with several wavelength reduction simulations of the existing esophageal data set. These results are an important step for the development of a...

Spectral measurement using IC-compatible linear variable optical filter

This paper reports on the functional and spectral characterization of a microspectrometer based on a CMOS detector array covered by an IC-Compatible Linear Variable Optical Filter (LVOF). The Fabry-Perot LVOF is composed of 15 dielectric layers with a tapered middle cavity layer, which has been fabricated in an IC-Compatible process using resist...

CMOS-compatible LVOF-based visible microspectrometer

This paper reports on a CMOS-Compatible Linear Variable Optical Filter (LVOF) visible micro-spectrometer. The CMOS-compatible post process for fabrication of the LVOF has been used for integration of the LVOF with a CMOS chip containing a 128-element photodiode array and readout circuitry. Fabrication of LVOF involves a process for fabrication...

High-resolution microspectrometer with an aberration-correcting planar grating

A concept for a highly miniaturized spectrometer featuring a two-component design is presented. The first component is a planar chip that integrates an input slit and aberration-correcting diffraction grating with an image sensor and is fabricated using microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technologies. Due to the fabrication in a simple MEMS...

Optimal implementation of a microspectrometer based on a single flat diffraction grating

An analytical model has been developed and applied to explore the limits in the design of a highly miniaturized planar optical microspectrometer based on an imaging diffraction grating. This design tool has been validated as providing the smallest possible dimensions while maintaining acceptable spectral resolution. The resulting planar...

An array of highly selective Fabry-Perot optical channels for biological fluid analysis by optical absorption using a white light source for illumination