Optical Switching

6MEMS‐based Optical Switches

Kalyan Biswas¹ and Angsuman Sarkar²

¹ Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, MCKV Institute of Engineering, Howrah, West Bengal, India

² Department of Kalyani Government Engineering College, Kalyani, West Bengal, India

6.1 Introduction

Increasing demand for information carrying capacity in telecommunication networks because of the exponential growth in IP traffic may be met only with implementation of Optical Communication Networks. To implement an efficient all‐optical network, several network components are required which can operate in the optical domain, for example, optical transmitters, optical receivers, optical fibers, optical amplifiers, filters, optical add‐drop multiplexers (OADM), wavelength converters, optical switches, etc. [1]. An optical switch is a very important device that directs an optical signal from one optical path to a desired second optical path within a certain range [2–4]. A fiber‐optic switch is one of the core devices for optical cross‐connection, optical add/drop multiplexing, network monitoring, and automatic protection system. There are different implementation technologies for optical switches, including: mechanical optical switches, electro‐optical switches, magneto‐optical switches, thermo‐optical switches, acousto‐optic switches, liquid crystal optical switches, and MEMS‐based optical switches. Opto‐mechanical switches utilize moving parts to direct lights from one port to another. They apply ...