Spatial light modulators are the well known digital mirror devices (DMD), micromechanical switching arrays and arrays of micro Fabry-Perots. As a new design micro slit arrays are presented. A micromachining technology was developed for microfabrication. Slits with dimensions of 3 micrometers ...1 mm were prepared on a membrane with a thickness of 1 micrometers . The aspect ratio is excellent. Dimensions down to optical aberration corrected limitation of microdevices and nearly down to light wavelength can be realized. Designs are addressable micro slit arrays in two membrane technology and coded micro slit arrays in one and two membrane architecture with more than 100 elements. Their principles, the design and their optical performance are discussed. The future application of these spatial light modulator microdevices is the digital light processing. The performance for example of a microspectrometer with the micro slit array is the increase of spectral resolution up to the factor of 2.6 based on generation of additional subpixels and simultaneously the increase of signal to noise ratio up to the factor of 10 and the parallelization by more than 100 modulator elements or light sources and its multiplexing. The application of micro slit arrays for realization of the HADAMARD principle is presented.

Date Published: 10 March 1999
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 3680, Design, Test, and Microfabrication of MEMS and MOEMS, (10 March 1999); doi: 10.1117/12.341227

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3680:
Design, Test, and Microfabrication of MEMS and MOEMS
Bernard Courtois; Wolfgang Ehrfeld; Selden B. Crary; Wolfgang Ehrfeld; Hiroyuki Fujita; Jean Michel Karam; Karen W. Markus, Editor(s)