Optical MEMS in Bonded Silicon on Insulator

Bonded silicon on insulator (BSOI) material provides an excellent solution for optical MEMS devices, which typically require optical surfaces with high flatness and low roughness to be combined with high quality mechanical parts and low power, high force microactuators. This paper will review a number of different approaches to optical MEMS, including surface tension self-assembly for 3D components such as fixed mirrors and lenses, torsion mirror scanners and active corner cube reflectors, and deep reactive ion etching for variable attenuators, blazed diffraction gratings and tuneable external cavity lasers. Current performance and limitations of tuneable components will be given. Methods of mounting additional macroscopic components such as filters and optical fibres will also be described, together with latching actuators for linear, rotary and