Microoptoelectromechanical systems (MOEMS), also known as optical MEMS, are integrations of mechanical, optical, and electrical systems that involve sensing or manipulating optical signals at a very small size. MOEMS includes a wide variety of devices, for example

optical switch An optical transistor, also known as an optical switch or a light valve, is a device that switches or amplifies optical signals. Light occurring on an optical transistor's input changes the intensity of light emitted from the transistor's output ...

optical cross-connect {{unreferenced, date=February 2008 An optical cross-connect (OXC) is a device used by telecommunications carriers to switch high-speed optical signals in a fiber optic network, such as an optical mesh network. There are several ways to realize a ...

, tunable

VCSEL The vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser, or VCSEL , is a type of semiconductor laser diode with laser beam emission perpendicular from the top surface, contrary to conventional edge-emitting semiconductor lasers (also ''in-plane'' lasers) which ...

, microbolometers. These devices are usually fabricated using micro-optics and standard micromachining technologies using materials like silicon,

silicon dioxide Silicon dioxide, also known as silica, is an oxide of silicon with the chemical formula , most commonly found in nature as quartz and in various living organisms. In many parts of the world, silica is the major constituent of sand. Silica is one ...

silicon nitride Silicon nitride is a chemical compound of the elements silicon and nitrogen. is the most thermodynamically stable and commercially important of the silicon nitrides, and the term "silicon nitride" commonly refers to this specific composition. It ...

and gallium arsenide.

Merging technologies

MOEMS includes two major technologies, microelectromechanical systems and micro-optics. Both these two technologies independently involve in batch processing similar to integrated circuits, and micromachining similar to fabrication of microsensor. Parallel with MEMS developments and even earlier, sensor technology advanced to microsensors and joining with microactuators. Development of microsensors and microactuators were also due to a mother technology of micromachining. Micromachining is the root of everything we have today in high technology. This technology was never credited in history as it deserved. It was commercially used during the 1960s in Switzerland, for micromachining

quartz Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica ( silicon dioxide). The atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon-oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall chemical ...

orders of magnitudes harder than micromachining silicon. MEMS acronym was so powerful during the 1980s, that with no choice microsensors and microactuators that included micromachining, all joined MEMS.

History of MOEMS

During 1991-1993, Dr. M. Edward Motamedi, a former Rockwell International innovator in the areas of both microelectromechanical systems and micro-optics, used internally the acronym of MOEMS for microoptoelectromechanical systems. This was to distinguish between optical MEMS and MOEMS, where optical MEMS could include bulk optics but MOEMS is truly based on microtechnology where MOEMS devices are batch-processed exactly like integrated circuits, but this is not true in most cases for optical MEMS. In 1993, Dr. Motamedi officially introduced MOEMS for the first time, as the powerful combination of MEMS and micro-optics, in an invited talk at the

SPIE SPIE (formerly the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, later the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) is an international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technology, founded in 1955. It ...

Critical Reviews of Optical Science and Technology conference in San Diego. In this talk Dr. Motamedi introduced the figure below, for showing that MOEMS is the interaction of three major microtechnologies; namely micro-optics, micromechanics, and microelectronics.M. E. Motamedi, "Merging Micro-optics with Micromechanics: Micro-Opto-Electro-Mechanical (MOEM) devices", Critical Reviews of Optical Science and Technology, V. CR49,

Annual Meeting, Proceeding of Diffractive and Miniaturized Optics, page 302-328, July, 1993

References

{{Reflist, 2

Bibliography

P. Rai-Choudhury (editor), ''MEMS and MOEMS. Technology and applications'', SPIE Press, Washington, 2000.

Optical MEMS: From micromirrors to complex systems, ''IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems'' (2014)
Optoelectronics

Merging technologies

History of MOEMS

See also

References

Bibliography