Justin Mansell wrote:
>
> I've read several articles about micromachined deformable mirrors and they
> look like a good alternative to the conventional DMs.  Can anyone recommend
> a company who is fabricating such a device?  Ideally I'm interested in a
> monolithic DM with high optical quality for use at 1.064 microns.
>                         Thanks,
>                                         Justin.
> Justin D. Mansell     | "For in weakness,
> 17 D Escondido Village        |       power reaches perfection"
> Stanford, CA 94305    |               -II Cor. 12:9
> (415) 497-9236                |
>

As far as I know, there are three places:

1. JPL, they published an article in Proc. SPIE in 1993 about
micromachined deformable mirror:

L.M. Miller, M.L. Argonin, R.K. Bartman, W.J. Kaiser, T.W. Kenny,
R.L. Norton, E.C. Vote, Fabrication and characterization of a
micromachined deformable mirror for adaptive optics applications,
Proc. SPIE {\bf 1945}, 421--430 (1993)
Seems this group had a working device.

2. Precision Engineering Research Laboratory, Boston University,
http://eng.bu.edu/~tgb/mems.html. They have a nice demonstration on
the web, but as far as I can judge (very little indeed) they have no
working device with uniform reflecting surface yet. They also have
published a paper in Proc. SPIE recently.

3. Electronic Instrumentation, TU Delft. We have a working technology
and we do fabricate mirrors. The standard device is circular, 1cm in
diameter, Al-coated, will work with CW YAG beams up to 20W (in the air
under atmospheric pressure) if the beam diameter is at least 5mm.  We
also make square mirrors with 5x5 actuator structure. Circular device
has 19 control channels (hexagonal pattern). Any actuator pattern can
be implemented, turnover is about 1 month, typical resolution is 50um,
so it would be difficult to implement more than 50 actuators. The
initial mirror surface is plane with RMS deviation less than 0.05
lambda for He-Ne laser, P-V is normally less than 0.15 lambda over the
whole clear aperture. You will need control voltages of about 300 V to
drive the device, but the electronics is very simple as the mirror
draws no current.  You can drive the whole multichannel device from
one high-voltage low-power transistor, if only you have good
high-voltage switches. The frequency range is of the order of few
hundred Hz ( up to 1-2 kHz), if you want to drive the mirror with
LARGE amplitude - 1-3 diopter!!! - it will go down to about
100Hz. There are some other interesting features. We ship devices for
free to organizations in Europe, this is supported by ESPRIT long-term
research project MOSIS (Micro-Optical SIlicon Systems). There will be
costs assotiated with fabrication and shipping devices to USA and
other countries.

For more info check:

http://guernsey.et.tudelft.nl
http://guernsey.et.tudelft.nl/MOSIS

The web page is rather old, we have made some progress since that.

Hope it helps,
Gleb.
---
Dr. G. Vdovin,
Electronic Instrumentation, TU Delft,
P.O. Box 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands.
Phone   31-15-2785756, Fax      31-15-2785755,
email   gleb@ei.et.tudelft.nl
URL     http://guernsey.et.tudelft.nl
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