Study and fabrication of a micro scanner for optical applications

iv v What are the possibilities of small but movable machines? They may or may not be useful, but they surely would be fun to make. in his talk " There's plenty of room at the bottom " Abstract Being currently performed on highly complex and expensive equipments, active optical alignment of single mode 10 Gb/s transmitters and receivers is proving to be the bottleneck process for high volume manufacturing. In order to alleviate this production burden, new integrated technologies are required to align micro-components like micro-lenses and optical fibers with photonic devices. Although passive alignment using Silicon micro-machined V-grooves seems to be very attractive at first, it has only been successfully implemented for micro-lens which can tolerate up to several microns of misalignment. To resolve the latter issue, we propose a MEMS XY scanner mounted with a micro-lens to actively perform optical alignment of fiber optics modules by steering a beam. Although similar techniques have been demonstrated, we describe a unique technology using a 2x2.7 mm silicon bulk micro-machining chip characterized by ±30 µm XY range of motion, electrostatic comb drives actuation and a silicon hybrid lens with alignment locking capability. This thesis presents the design, fabrication and operation principle of an optical beam steerer for laser fiber coupling based on a MEMS device. The MEMS chip consists on a bi-dimensional movable platform based on uni-dimensional comb drive actuation. An optical lens is assembled onto the mobile platform to focus and steer the light coming from a laser diode and couple it into an optical fiber. Assembly of a complete system and measurements were performed and compared to simulation results. Both the trajectory of the MEMS and resonance frequency measurements agree with the simulated ones. Etant actuellement exécuté sur de très complexes et coûteux équipements, l'alignement optique d'émetteurs et récepteurs de 10 Gb/s à fibres optiques monomodes se trouve être le talon d'Achille pour la fabrication à gros volumes de tels systèmes. Dans le but de résoudre ces problèmes, de nouvelles technologies doivent être développées pour aligner des micro-composants tels que les micro-lentilles et les fibres optiques avec d'autres modules optiques. Bien que l'alignement passif utilisant des structures de guidage intégrées sem-ble intéressant à premier abord, elles ne peuvent être utilisées efficacement que pour des micro-lentilles pouvant tolérer des erreurs de positionnement de plusieurs micromètres. Afin de résoudre ce dernier problème, nous proposons un nouveau scanner bidimensionnel MEMS comprenant …