A rotary electrostatic micromotor 1/spl times/8 optical switch

A 1/spl times/8 rotary electrostatic micromotor optical switch fabricated using deep reactive ion etching technology has been demonstrated. The switches consist of silent-pole micromotors with 1 mm-diameter, 200 /spl mu/m-thick rotors that support either a 200 /spl mu/m or a 500 /spl mu/m-tall, 900 /spl mu/m-wide mirror. After fabrication of the components, switches were assembled and operated for extended periods in room air. Typical switches were actuated at 50 V and found to have a rapid rotation with an average optical switching time between fiber ports of 18.4 ms. Optical testing was performed at 1310 nm in single and multi-mode, and at 850 nm in multi-mode. The optical beam was propagated in free space with minimal divergence through the use of externally-mounted collimating gradient-index (GRIN) lenses. With an aluminum coating, the mirror and external optics exhibited an input to output coupling loss as low as 0.96 dB in multi-mode and 2.32 dB in single-mode. Inter-channel cross talk was less than -45 dB.