MEMS laser power regulator for optical sensors and networks

This paper reports a micromachined reflective-type MEMS power regulator (PR) for optical networks. The PR consists of an improvingly designed variable optical attenuator (VOA), which has superior performance as compared with the conventional flat-mirror reflection-type and shutter-type VOAs. It uses an elliptical mirror as the movable reflector. It achieves a large attenuation range at low insertion loss and low voltage. More importantly, it uses only normal fibers as the input and output, and the attenuation increases nearly linearly with the mirror displacement. The improved reflective-type VOA obtains a 44 dB tuning range at an insertion loss of 0.7 dB. At 20 dB attenuation level, the wavelength dependent loss (WDL) is 1.0 dB for 100nm (1520 nm ~ 1620 nm) wavelength range, and the polarization dependent loss (PDL) is 0.3 dB