A rotary electrostatic micromotor 1×8 optical switch

This paper describes a 1×8 rotary electrostatic micromotor optical switch fabricated using high-aspect-ratio micromachining technology to produce silicon or nickel components which are subsequently assembled to form a switch. The switch consists of a salient-pole micromotor with 1-mm-diameter 200-μm-thick rotor that supports up to a 500-μm-tall, 900-μm-wide mirror. Typical switches were actuated at 50 V, operated for extended periods in room air, and found to have a rapid rotation with an average optical switching time between two neighboring fiber ports of 18 ms. Optical testing was performed at wavelength of 1310 nm in single- and multimode, and at 850 nm in multimode. The optical beam was propagated in free space with minimal divergence through the use of externally mounted collimating gradient-index lenses. With an aluminum coating, the mirror and external optics exhibited an input to output coupling loss as low as 0.96 dB in multimode and 2.32 dB in single-mode. Interchannel crosstalk was less than -45 dB