High-spatial-frequency grating technology for microsystem applications

A sub-micron grating can be the key miniaturized planar element in Micro-opto-electromechanical systems where it performs a number of optical functions such as light routing, beam splitting, spectral-analysis, polarization filtering, beam recombination, spatial resonance excitation, in the domains of displacement measurement, biochemical sensors, environment monitoring, laser emission control, WDM communications, to quote a few current applications. This paper will describe the main stream technology of sub-micron gratings and illustrate its application potential.