Third‐order, one‐dimensional, semiconductor‐air gratings have been designed, fabricated, and evaluated by optical waveguide transmission measurements. Gratings with as little as six unit cells show a clear band edge around 840–850 nm. Owing to our approach of semiconductor‐rich lattices with small airgaps, the diffractive spreading loss is sufficiently small (∼50% in the passband) for meaningful results to be extracted. The measurements indicate that the optical waveguide approach is a good starting point for the study of photonic microstructures and that practical device concepts can be implemented. ©1996 American Institute of Physics.