A MEMS-based VOA with very low PDL

In this letter, we study the optical performance of a microelectromechanical system reflection-type variable optical attenuator (VOA). Experimental results of packaged VOA devices show that the proposed architecture exhibits very low polarization dependence within the entire attenuation range (polarization-dependent loss (PDL)<0.1 dB at 30-dB attenuation level).