Optical properties of subwavelength patterned metal gratings for photonic device application and an alternative proposal

We investigated optical properties of subwavelength patterned metal gratings for photonic device application. It was known that optical transmittance of metal films with subwavelength periodic hole arrays can be controlled by applying a dielectric overlay to the film and the films can act as wavelength or frequency selective filters. Following advancement in lithography technology it could be applied up to complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors (CIS) by patterning metal layers placed on each pixel’s photo detective device. However it is not easy to replace organic color filters applied on CIS up to date because the standard CIS structure has multi-metal layers, thick dielectric layers, and too thick metal layers. In this work, we explore possibility to integrate the metal film into a CIS chip and present an alternative proposal by computer simulation utilizing finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. We applied aluminum (Al) for the metal film and the dispersion information associated with Al was derived from the Lorentz-Drude model. We expect that this work could contribute to search to apply subwavelength patterned metal gratings to photonic devices.