The goal of this work is to develop CMOS compatible, integrated optical circuit elements that can be integrated together with electronic circuits to create a functional and fully integrated opto-electronic chip. Applications of this technology include telecommunications, biological sensing for security or biotechnology research, extremely high-speed interconnects for high performance computing, optical computing, optical data transfer and/or clocking within integrated circuits, and phased-array radar systems.

As part of this project, a wavelength-selective integrated optical switch has been developed. An integrated optical switch is a basic building block of integrated optical circuits and allows the routing of the light throughout the circuit. This switch is particularly unique in that it provides wavelength-selective switching. This is a key characteristic due to the advent of wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) in optical communications.

This switch is based on an already successful passive integrated optical element, the optical microring resonator filter. The microring resonator is changed into an active element by integrating the microring with a MEMS device that controllably introduces optical loss in the evanescent field of the microring resonator. The optical loss comes from a membrane of optically lossy material that is moved into and out of the evanescent field of the microring resonator. When the lossy material is outside of the evanescent field of the microring resonator, the resonant wavelength is coupled to the drop waveguide. When the lossy material is within the evanescent field, the resonant wavelength remains in the through waveguide.

This switch provides very unique functionality in a very small form factor compared to alternative methods. This type of integrated switching has previously only been done by using a broadband optical switch coupled to some type of passive filtering element – resulting in a device with a very large footprint.

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