Studying the polarization and spectral distortion of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in tandem with intensity fluctuations of the cosmic infrared background allows us to verify our assumptions on cosmic inflation and investigate the dynamics and evolution of galaxy clusters in the past 10 billion years. Because of its broadband emission and being an all-sky extended source, observing the entire CMB in detail is a very time-consuming and expensive exercise. Fortunately, in the past few years, the on-chip superconducting spectrometer technology has moved out of the lab and into the telescope. With its compact size and background-limited sensitivity, this family of instruments is particularly well-suited for fast and large area observations in a relatively unexplored range of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, recent examples of this technology do not yet reach the requirements needed for large spectroscopic and polarimetric surveys of the CMB. We formulate several of these requirements and introduce novel on-chip components and fabrication techniques. We introduce a crossover to enable distinguishing signal polarization, minimize signal loss by locally optimized lithography of a coplanar waveguide, lower the spectral resolution of microstrip filters by deposition of a dielectric layer, and increase the yield of the spectrometer array by removing individual line shorts. These together have culminated in the successful fabrication of a 14-spaxel integral field unit. ... Read more

Achieving a wide instantaneous bandwidth and wide scanning capabilities are essential for development of (sub)millimeter imaging spectrometers for astronomical observations. Such an instrument can be realized using complex quasi-optical (QO) systems. In this work, we propose a QO architecture based on refractive components to reduce the overall size and volume of the instrument. This compact design is optimized using a sequential Geometrical Optics based technique. The performance of the preliminary design is reported in terms of the aperture efficiency over an octave of bandwidth and the field of view of the telescope hosting the instrument exhibiting less than 1dB of scan loss. The finalized design of the instrument, its performance, and realization approach will be discussed at the conference. ... Read more