Design and Fabrication of a Fiber-Optic Deep-Etched Silicon Fabry-Perot Temperature Sensor

Design and fabrication of a silicon-based fiber-optic temperature sensor is reported. It is based on a planar Fabry-Perot resonator fabricated on a silicon substrate using highly anisotropic deep reactive ion etching process. Due to the large thermo-optic coefficient and thermal expansion coefficient of silicon, we have typically achieved a sensitivity of 0.5mV/degrees C in our measurements. The paper also includes a summary of our computational method to analyze the propagation of an optical Gaussian beam throughout the Fabry-Perot cavity fabricated in the silicon substrate.