Fabrication of out-of-plane micromirrors in silicon-on-insulator planar waveguides

Emerging optical waveguide spectrometers, sensors, and biochips require the simultaneous acquisition of numerous optical signals. Aligning many tens or hundreds of optical fibers to waveguides is a formidable and costly exercise in packaging. We propose a data acquisition scheme using arrays of micromirrors to redirect light propagating in each waveguide out of the device surface, where all the beams can be collected by a single imaging array. …