Analog piezoelectric-driven tunable gratings with nanometer resolution

This work presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a piezoelectrically actuated MEMS diffractive optical grating, whose spatial periodicity can be tuned in analog fashion to within a fraction of a nanometer. The fine control of the diffracted beams permits applications in dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) optical telecommunications and high-resolution miniaturized spectrometers. The design concept consists of a diffractive grating defined on a deformable membrane, strained in the direction perpendicular to the gratings grooves via thin-film piezoelectric actuators. The tunable angular range for the first diffracted order is up to 400 μrad with 0.2% strain (∼8 nm change in grating periodicity) at 10 V actuation, as predicted by device modeling. The actuators demonstrate a piezoelectric d₃₁ coefficient of -100 pC/N and dielectric constant ε_r of 1200. Uniformity across the tunable grating and the out-of-plane deflections are also characterized and discussed.