Design of spatial light modulator microdevices–micro slit arrays

Spatial light modulators are the well known digital mirror devices (DMD). micromechanical switching arrays and arrays of micro Fabry-Pcrots. As a new design micro slit arrays are presented. A micromachining technology was developed for microfabrication. Slits with dimensions of 3 m... 1 mm were prepared on a membrane with a thickness of I im. The aspect ratio is excellent. Dimensions down to optical aberration corrected limitation of microdevices and nearly down to light wavelength can be realized. Designs are addressable micro slit arrays in two membrane technology and coded micro slit arrays in oneand two mem-brane architecture with more than 100 elements. Their principles., the design and their optical performance are discussed. The future application of these spatial light modulator microdevices is the digital light processing. The perfor-mance for example of a microspectrometer with the micro slit array is the increase of spectral resolution up tothe factor of 2.6 based on generation of additional suhpixels and simultaneously the increase of signal to noise ratio up to the factor ot 10 and the parallization by more than 100 modulator elements or light sources and its multiplexing. The application of micro slit arrays for realization of the HADAMARD principle is presented