Opportunities for Mechanically Actuated Photonics

Inhalt:
Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) promise to be the optical equivalent of electronic integrated circuits (ICs). However, current PICs cannot match the number of devices per chip of electronic ICs due to active photonic components' large footprint and power consumption. By micromechanical actuation of PICs, we show compact devices with orders of magnitude power reduction compared to thermo-optic counterparts.