Programmable silicon photonic circuits powered by MEMS

We present our work to extend silicon photonics with MEMS actuators to enable low-power, large scale programmable photonic circuits. For this, we start from the existing iSiPP50G silicon photonics platform of IMEC, where we add free-standing movable waveguides using a few post-processing steps. This allows us to implement phase shifters and tunable couplers using electrostatically actuated MEMS, while at the same time maintaining all the original functionality of the silicon photonics platform. The MEMS devices are protected using a wafer-level sealing approach and interfaced with custom multi-channel driver and readout electronics.