Opportunities and challenges for MEMS in lightwave communications

摘要

Over the remarkably short interval of just a few years, opticalnmicroelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have breached the gulf fromnlaboratory curiosity to advanced development and early trial deploymentnin lightwave-communications systems. This owes largely to the ease withnwhich the technology has demonstrated high optical quality andnreasonably fast tuning and switching subsystems that are compact andnpotentially low in cost. Lightwave micromachines now threaten to makenpossible functional structures for building tunable lasers and filters,ndynamic gain-equalizers, chromatic dispersion-compensators,nwavelength-add-drop multiplexers, and polarization-controllers thatnrepresent substantial improvements over the conventional state of thenart. More extravagant yet, both in promise and in expectations, is thenpotential of MEMS as a means of building the large-port-count opticalnswitches that are just now becoming needed by emerging mesh-based corentransport networks. In this paper, we review the current status andnprospects for MEMS in lightwave communications, with particular emphasisnon high-port-count core optical cross connects, and discuss challengesnthat still confront this technology