Abstract

This paper reports a nano-silicon-photonic Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer-on-a-chip, which is integrated with fiber-waveguide coupler and photo detector on a single silicon chip. Spectrometer based on Fourier transform, for the first time, has been miniaturized into a waveguide based silicon photonic chip. Our breakthrough research on on-chip spectrometer using nano-silicon-photonic fabrication processes to eliminate moving parts and confine light in nano-waveguides, which can effectively reduce the spectrometer chip size (1 cm × 1 cm) and lower the power consumption (< 10 mW), while maintaining high resolution (< 10 cm-1). It has high potential applications in biomedical and physical spectroscopy field.

© 2015 Optical Society of America