Compact diffractive interferometric displacement sensor in reflection

A displacement measurement technology of diffractive interferometry has been developed in the objective of miniaturization. The interference principle has been implemented in the form of a miniature read head prototype according to a novel device configuration after a discussion on the fabrication and mouting tolerances has been made conducting to a high resolution micro-optical encoder. A read-out grating acting simultaneously as a subwavelength and a two order grating enables the miniaturization of a diffractive interferometric optical displacement sensor of the reflection type.