Photonic MEMS: Coupling Mechanics & Photonics at the Micro- and Nanoscale

Photonic integrated circuits have seen a dramatic increase in complexity over the past decades, driven by recent applications in datacenter communications and enabled by the availability of standardized mature technology offerings. Among several directions that are currently pursued to enhance functionality and to reduce power consumption in photonic integrated circuits, we exploit in our research mechanical movement of wave-guiding structures at the micro- and nanoscale, motivated by the unique opportunities of access to a strong modulation of the effective index and the possibility to include mechanical latching and thus non-volatile states. In this talk, we will show how we can exploit nano-mechanics in photonic integrated circuits to perform basic operations on-chip, such as phase shifting, attenuation or photonic switching. Due to their small footprint and low insertion loss, such components can be integrated to form large arrays of several thousands of unit cells with outstanding system performance. We will discuss how movable waveguides can be fabricated in dedicated surface micromachining technology or by selective post-processing in a standard silicon photonics platform. We will discuss an experimental demonstrator of a mechanical waveguide latching mechanism, and provide an outlook on the implementation of the concept of large-scale reconfigurable photonic integrated circuits using Silicon Photonic MEMS.