Scalable Row/Column Addressing of Silicon Photonic MEMS Switches

In this letter, we demonstrate a scalable addressing scheme for silicon photonic MEMS switches. For a crossbar architecture switch fabric of dimension N x N, the row/column addressing scales with 2 . N electrodes, much reduced from the N-2 electrodes in individual addressing. It also compares favorably with other optical switch architectures, including path-independent insertion loss, Benes, or switch-and-select networks, in terms of electrical interface. We have designed, fabricated, and experimentally characterized the performance of a 4 x 4 silicon photonic MEMS switch.