Design of Optical MEMS based Tunable Variable Optical Attenuator

A thin film of Gold(Au ; refractive index of 1.1786) held by a cantilever beam which is driven by a voltage actuator has been investigated for implementation of a variable optical attenuator(VOA) applications. The designed microelectro-mechanical system(MEMS) consists of a single mode silicon(Si ; refractive index of 1.45) wire waveguide as the crux of the structure. The normalized curve of the power versus distance in the z- plane of the waveguide shows a decrease from 0.9 to 0.6 along the length of the waveguide. The dimensions of the device is designed to achieve the optimal performance using Rsoft software. Another designed system involves the use of epoxy based polymers, EpoClad (refractive index of 1.57 at 830nm) and EpoCore (refractive index of 1.58 at 830nm) [2] to design buried-rib waveguide and strip-loaded waveguide. The dimensions of the device is designed to achieve the maximum performance using Rsoft software. Simulation were carried out using the Beam Propagation Method[BPM].