Micro-opto-mechanical grating switches

This paper reports the design, fabrication, and testing of a Micro-opto-mechanical grating switch driven by electrostatic actuator for fiber-optic communication applications. It consists of two bounded silicon wafers. One input fiber with a hemispherical lens at its end and three photodetectors are mounted on the upper wafer. A movable platform with two gratings and one mirror are fabricated on the lower wafer. When the movable platform is at a certain position, the input beam can be split into three beams by the gratings. The reflectivity of the mirror is about 85% while the efficiency in the three different order is 29%, 26%, and 26%. The switching speed is about 500 μs. Details of the grating switching design, theoretical analysis, fabrication and experimental results are presented in this paper.