Addressable Micromachined UV Light Sources for Active Patterning

This paper presents a programmable UV light source array which can generate a patterned UV light for various applications. While all existing excimer lasers or UV light sources are based on a static compositional patterning, the UV light source array presented in this paper can be used to define arbitrary patterns in real-time. As a demonstration, UV light source arrays with 5x5 and 8x8 via holes, whose diameters range from 100 mum to 400 mum, were fabricated with a silicon wafer using MEMS micromachining techniques. The devices have been tested with voltage ranging from 200V to 1KV and pressure ranging 100mTorr to 200Torr which depend on the dimensions of the structures. Four quarters of the light sources were connected to different electrodes and illuminated each one at a time consecutively showing the patterning capability. Additionally, the number '1' and '2' patterns were generated with the UV light source array.