A Discrete Positioning Microactuator: Linearity Modeling and VOA Application

In this paper, we propose a discrete microactuator that can produce a desirable nonlinear displacement of the digital input. To develop a design algorithm with an arbitrary displacement function, we used curved comb electrodes that were electrically separated for each digital input. The algorithm was used to linearize the variable optical attenuator with a constant increment of 0.5 dB and an attenuation range of 32.6 dB. The experimental linearity was considerably improved down to 4.2% with an insertion loss of 1.1 dB