Chip-Scale Digital Mid-Infrared Computational Spectrometer Powered by MEMS Technology

This paper reports an advanced mid-infrared (Mid-IR) chip-scale digital MEMS-enabled computational spectrometer (d-McS) through controlling multi-stage cascaded MEMS waveguide couplers. The MEMS waveguide couplers are operated in digital on/off mode, thus making the device immune to driving voltage noise and robust for on-chip field sensing applications. Our proposed spectrometer is compact and exhibits an average spectral resolution of 9.4 nm in the 3.7 to 4.1 μm wavelength range. Benefitting from good scalability, the spectral resolution can be further improved easily by increasing the number of waveguide coupler stages.