Contributing Editor, MEMS Investor Journal Optical MEMS have
long been a goal of forward-thinking electronics innovators, but
these technologies have had a rocky development road. Lately,
however, the big money in semiconductor research – IBM and Intel
– have reported significant successes in using the traditional
CMOS toolkits to micromachine optical structures. Related work
is also being done at Hewlett-Packard, Alcatel-Lucent and other
research labs worldwide. Waveguides, gratings, resonators,
modulators, and other tiny mechanical structures can effectively
sculpt light for communication purposes when shrunk to sizes
that correspond to the wavelength of light being manipulated.
And with the semiconductor powerhouses behind these efforts,
optical MEMS may finally be on the threshold of mass
commercialization. The one major success story in optical MEMS
–Texas Instrument's digital light processor (DLP) – uses micron-
sized mechanical mirrors to re-direct light from LEDs or lasers
into the raster patterns that