SGER: Characterization of InP as a MEMS Material for the Development of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Lossless Cross-Connect Waveguide Switch

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We envision the development of an innovative optical cross-connect switch based on mechanical transducers for switching between optical waveguides as shown in Figure 1. It consists of 4 input fibers connected to 4 input waveguides on the switch. At each of the interconnect points, a microactivated micro-stage can be moved along a 45 axis to allow for steering the beam at 90 with respect to the original direction. In this way, any inputs can be steered to any outputs in a non-blocking way. Contrary to what is typically done in the area of micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems, the mechanical movements of the switch are not implemented using silicon technology but are directly realized in III-V compound semiconductors [1]. This has the important advantage of permitting the monolithic integration of active (i.e. semiconductor lasers, SOA, etc.) and passive waveguide devices (like the WDM filters, arrayed waveguide gratings) with the switching fabric. It can be envisioned that this should lead to complex wavelength cross-connect systems on a single chip. Switching time will be optimized by minimizing the mass of the moving parts and by reducing the required displacements to distances of the order of 3 microns. Dissipation of activated in one of its possible states. On the 4 output waveguides, SOA's are monolithically integrated to compensate for optical losses in the same way that we recently demonstrated a lossless 1 x 2 splitter. A passive-active resonant coupler to move the mode from a passive waveguide to a vertically positioned active waveguide using the PARC platform technology [2] can be used for the integration.