MOEMS Device Technology

Published:2011/6/21 3:15:00 Author:Amy From:SeekIC

Micro-electro-opto-mechanical system (MOEMS) is an emerging technology which has become one of most popular technology. It adopts MEMS of photonic system with internal micro-mechanical light modulator, micro-mechanical optical switches, IC and other components. The MOEMS technology features miniaturization, multiplicity and microelectronics and has a seamless integrating the optical components with electrical parts. In brief, MOEMS is further integration for system chip. As it is compared to large-scale opto-mechanical devices, MOEMS is smaller, lighter and faster (with higher resonant frequency), and can take mass production technology. When it is compared to waveguide mode, this kind of free space mode has the benefit of lower coupling loss and smaller crosstalk. Photonics and information technology changes directly contributed to the development of MOEMS. Nowadays, information technology develops rapidly and brings constant renewal in photonics. The demand for increasing data rate and more excellent performance of new generation device stimulates MOEMS and optical interconnect need.

MOEMS devices, according to their working principles, can be classified as interference, diffraction, transmission and reflection-type, and most of them adopt reflection-type devices. In past few years, MOEMS has achieved tremendous improvement. In recent years, the increasing high-speed communications and data transmission greatly stimulates the developing and research of MOEMS technology and related devices. Some MOEMS devices with low loss, low EMV sensitivity and reflective light with low crosstalk high data rate have been developed.

Besides VOA simple components, MOEMS technology also can be used in tunable vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL), optical modulators, tunable wavelength photo detector and other optical active devices, which optical Cross Connect to filters, optical switches, programmable wavelength optical add / drop multiplexer (OADM) and other optical active devices.

In the filed of information technology, the key problem in optical application commercial light source, besides single chip (like thermal radiation, LED, LD, VCSEL), the MOEMS light source with active devices is focused more attention. For instance, as for tunable VCSEL, the the emission wavelength can be changed by changing the length of micro-mechanical resonator to achieve high-performance WDM technology. The related integrated circuit is MC010.

Reprinted Url Of This Article: http://www.seekic.com/blog/Appliance/2011/06/21/MOEMS_Device_Technology.html

Print this Page | Comments | Reading(274)