Theoretical analysis and experimental measurement on the maximum blazing angle for microprogrammable gratings

Based on the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology, a new microprogrammable grating with tunable blazing angle was designed and fabricated by using the two-layer polysilicon surface micromachining process. The basic operational principle and structural characterizations fabricated grating were briefly introduced and then the maximum blazing angle, the most important optical parameter, was theoretically computed according to the designed structural dimensions and numerically simulated by combining the finite element simulation tool of ANSYS with Matlab's data processing functionality. A simple but efficient optical system was set up for measuring the maximum blazing angle. The results from simulation, calculation and experiments agree very well with each other. The maximum blazing angle of the fabricated micro programmable grating is larger than 5°.