A novel approach to low-cost optical fiber switches

Optical fiber switches are commercially available in many different designs, which all have one in common: a high price. In this presentation we propose a low-cost electrostatically actuated 1/spl times/ 2 fiber switch which basically consists of two active compounds, i.e. metalized movable fibers and fixed electrodes. With this set-up, a direct movement and, additionally, a self-alignment of the fibers is performed. In contrary to other MEMS designs no more moving parts are necessary. It is possible to fabricate the whole device with polymer techniques instead of complex and expensive silicon technology. With operation voltages below 75 V switching times below 10 ms can be achieved.