Tunable MEMS etalon

Abstract

Disclosed herein is a novel a tunable Micro-Electro-Mechanical (MEMS) Etalon system including: a functional layer patterned to define a suspension structure for suspending a first mirror being an aperture mirror of the Etalon, an aperture mirror coupled to the suspension structure, and a back layer including a second mirror, being a back mirror of the Etalon. The functional layer may be located above the back layer and the back layer may include spacer structures protruding therefrom towards the aperture mirror to define a minimal gap between the aperture mirror and the back mirror and prevent collision between them. The aspect ratio between the width of the etalon/mirrors may be high (e.g. at least 500), and the minimal gap/distance between the mirrors may be small in the order of tens of nanometers (nm). Accordingly, in some implementations the parallelism between the aperture mirror and the back mirror is adjustable to avoid chromatic artifacts associated with spatial variations in the spectral transmission profile across the etalon.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.