Design and Fabrication of a Micro-Mirror for Low-Resolution Spectroscopy

A wide variety of MEMS micro-mirrors are being developed for various optical applications. One such application is Fourier transform spectroscopy (FTS). The design, process optimization, and fabrication of a micro-mirror for this application are presented. Large, nontilting displacements of mirrors are required to achieve high FTS resolution. Although, certain applications require lower resolution, the mirror still needs to be nontilting. In order to obtain this without using deep reactive ion etching (DRIE), the micro-mirrors were fabricated on silicon using bulk micromachining with wet chemical etching. This paper presents the process developed for fabrication of the mirror with the required specifications. In addition, results of the FTS experiments conducted with the micro-mirror will also be presented.