Design and fabrication of GaAs-GaAlAs micromachined tunable filter with thermal strain control

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design and fabrication of a novel GaAlAs-GaAs micromachined vertical cavity filter with a thermal strain control layer for wide wavelength tuning. The integration of a thermal strain control layer and heating element enables wavelength tuning induced by heating. The proposed tunable filter under thermal tuning operation provides us large tuning range over conventional micromachined tunable filters using electrostatic force. The calculated result shows a possibility of large continuous tuning range of over 100 nm. We fabricated a micromachined GaAlAs-GaAs vertical cavity filter with a strain control layer. The temperature dependence of the filter can be freely controlled either with temperature insensitive operation or with an enhanced temperature dependence, which depends on the thickness of the thermal strain control layer. We demonstrate a thermal wavelength tuning of 53 nm with a low tuning voltage of 6.1 V for the first time.