Application of a Computer-Supported Method for Design Optimization of Microoptical Systems on an IR Gas Sensor

摘要

Manufacturing test structures of microsensors and microactuators is very expensive in terms of time and materials. In a conventional design process, this limits the number of design variants to be considered. For this reason, computer-supported design techniques are becoming more and more important in microsystems technologies. The modular structure of hybrid systems requires single components to be manufactured in isolation and later combined into one total system. Combining single components into one overall system is bound to be subject to certain tolerances. The concept presented in this paper is the computer-aided design of a modular system rugged enough to be employed in mass fabrication. In mass fabrication, it is not the ideal arrangement of individual components which results in the most effective system. Instead, tolerances in positioning individual optical elements need to be taken into account already in modeling. Furthermore environmental influences like e.g. variations of the temperature can have an impact on the performance of the optical function module.