Rethinking Consumer Spectroscopy

Projects sometimes take an unexpected path. Chromation’s story began in 2009 at Columbia University, N.Y., USA, when one of the authors (Pervez) was working with the other (Kymissis) on a project using photonic crystals. The project’s goal was to enhance brightness in top-emitting OLEDs on CMOS. To speed up development of the fabrication process, we tried a glass slab simulant with the photonic-crystal designs under test to mimic the OLED seal and passivation layers, assessing the performance via the photonic crystal’s scattering of waveguided light. The light scattering was spectrally selective, and it quickly became apparent that the simulant structure could be used to make an extremely small, simple spectrometer.