Commercially manufactured near-infrared (NIR) instruments became available about 50 years ago. While they have been designed for laboratory use in a controlled environment and boast high performance, they are generally bulky, fragile and maintenance intensive, and therefore expensive to purchase and maintain. Micromachining is a powerful technique to fabricate micromechanical parts such as integrated circuits. It was perfected in the 1980s and led to the invention of micro electro mechanical systems (MEMSs). The three characteristic features of MEMS fabrication technologies are miniaturization, multiplicity and microelectronics. Combined, these features allow the batch production of compact and rugged devices with integrated intelligence. In order to build more compact, more rugged and less expensive NIR instruments, MEMS technology has been successfully integrated into a range of new devices. In the first part of this paper we discuss the UWA MEMS-based Fabry–Pérot spectrometer, its design and issues to be solved. MEMS-based Fabry–Pérot filters primarily isolate certain wavelengths by sweeping across an incident spectrum and the resulting monochromatic signal is detected by a broadband detector. In the second part, we discuss other microspectrometers including other Fabry–Pérot spectrometer designs, time multiplexing devices and mixed time/space multiplexing devices.

Zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films were deposited on Silicon substrates by DC and RF sputtering deposition. Thermal annealing was performed at up to 900°C in N2 for 30 min. The samples were dry etched for 30 min using CHF3 plasma. The effect of different sputtering techniques, annealing and reactive ion etching (RIE) were investigated using X-ray diffraction, Rutherford backscattering (RBS), photoluminescence (PL) spectra, atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and piezoelectric measurements. The PL response improved considerably during annealing and was further enhanced after RIE process. RBS traced a C rich surface layer on all etched samples, which is possibly caused by the etching gas.

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