Miniaturized optical spectrometers have promising prospects, owing to their potential applications in several areas such as healthcare, industrial in-line inspection, remote sensing and so on. Recently, significant progress has been made in the development of computational micro-spectrometers based on compressive sensing techniques that use on-chip photonic filters coupled to the image sensor. We present a hybrid design for a photonic filter chip based on photonic crystal structures that can improve the spectral reconstruction efficiency of computational micro-spectrometers. Our design consists of multiple layers of optical materials, where the thickness of each layer is optimized to facilitate the generation of random and minimally correlated optical transmission through multiple on-chip photonic filters, which are required for the effective execution of compressive sensing algorithms. We verified our design by performing multiple simulated reconstructions of different spectral signals and using reconstruction algorithms.
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