NEMS spectrometer-on-a-chip

This paper reports a NEMS spectrometer-on-a-chip, which integrates 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. The on-chip spectrometer is fabricated by nano-silicon-photonic fabrication processes. It also eliminates 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 (<; 40 cm-1). It has high potential applications in biomedical and physical spectroscopy field.