C. Huber, P. Liu, C. Krämmer, B. Stein, and H. Kalt

J. Microelectromech. S. 27, 836-843 (2018)

This paper presents surface micromachined MEMS Fabry-Pérot interferometers (FPIs) with two released membrane mirrors. Fabrication of such FPIs with large-area membrane reflectors of up to 5 mm in diameter for first-order operation in the near infrared is shown. The mirrors are distributed Bragg reflectors based on silicon and silicon carbonitride. Single mirror membrane FPIs with the same mirror design are used as a benchmark in order to demonstrate the improvements achievable by the double membrane approach. To that end, the FPIs are characterized with respect to their top surface flatness by white light interferometry as well as to the variations of the optical gap width over the aperture area by spatially resolved transmittance measurements. It is shown that the upper mirror membranes are flat within the nanometer range for both approaches. Nevertheless, single membrane FPIs exhibit strongly increasing gap variations for increasing membrane diameters due to a bow in the substrate wafer, thus decreasing the filter resolution over the full aperture. On the other hand, for double-membrane FPIs, the mirrors are highly parallel with a standard deviation of the gap as low as 2 nm.