MEMS switch based serial reconfigurable OADM

A micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) switch based serial optical add/drop multiplexer (OADM) is demonstrated. This OADM consists of a few cascaded cells, each of which includes one 2 × 2 MEMS optical switch, a tunable fiber Bragg grating (FBG) filter and an optical circulator. Each cell can handle four consecutive channels with 100 GHz spacing. The modularization makes the network upgrading easy. Power consumption of such system is several milli-watts and the isolation between any two channels is greater than 30 dB. The in-plane MEMS optical switches are integrated on single chip and fabricated by deep reactive ion etching technology, whose driving voltage is only 30 V. A uniform metal layer is coated on the FBG by using sputter to obtain 2.9 nm center wavelength tuning range with a maximum injecting current of 12 mA. The MEMS technology makes the coupling and assembly of the switch, filter and circulator easy, precise, and reliable due to the fiber grooves. Various data formats can be added and/or dropped by the proposed OADM because it is bit-rate independent.