MEMS Electrostatic Micro-shutter Arrays for Astronomical Multi-Object Spectrographs

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K05713
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Production engineering/Processing studies
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: Takahashi Takuya 東京大学, 生産技術研究所, 技術専門職員 (60451879)
• Co-Investigator(Renkei-kenkyūsha): TOSHIYOSHI Hiroshi 東京大学, 先端科学技術研究センター, 教授 (50282603) ; MOTOHARA Kentaro 東京大学, 理学系研究科, 准教授 (90343102) ; KONISHI Masahiro 東京大学, 理学系研究科, 特任助教 (50532545)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: ナノマイクロ加工 / 赤外線天文学

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Astronomical multi-object spectrographs (MOSs) are becoming a powerful tool for the deep survey of the galaxies. As an alternative method to the conventional MOSs (metal slit-masks), we have proposed a MEMS (microelectromechanical system) shutter array that can be operated to open and close the individual shutter plate, where more than 8,000 shutter elements are tiled to make an electrically addressed MOSs plate.
An SOI (silicon-on-insulator) with a 1.25-um active layer is patterned the shutter plate of 1 millimeter by 0.1 millimeter by the deep reactive ion etching (DRIE). In a vacuum and cryogenic environment, we have measured the robustness against the thermal stress of the developed visored shutter structure and the electrostatic drive characteristic. Finally, we have reported the passive matrix method which can be selected the arbitrary shutters by the X-row and Y-column electrodes with the 3x3 shutter matrix sub units.

Free Research Field

半導体マイクロマシニング