Electrostatic scanning mirrors, Adaptive optics, SOI

Tronics has developed manufacturing solutions and specific know-how for the realization of 1D and 2D electrostatic actuators for components such as switches, scanners and adaptive optics. These technologies feature:

• Single-crystal silicon structures (SOI) highly resistant to mechanical fatigues
• DRIE-etched parallel comb drives or vertical electrodes actuation
• Gold-based highly reflective coatings on mirrors
• Solutions for solving electrostatic charge injection
• Wafer-level packaging with anti-reflective coating
• Vacuum packaging for high-speed/low-voltage mirrors

Based on this know-how Tronics partners with OEMs to develop, industrialize and bring to the market high-performance custom optical MEMS and MOEMS products that are strategic to our partners' application. Product development projects conducted at Tronics include some of the following.

Switching Mirror Arrays:

All optical switching applications and reconfigurable add/drop multiplexer will play an increasing role in optical telecommunication in the future. In collaboration with Alcatel and a leading component and sub-systems manufacturer, we demonstrated the functionality of a mirror array for ROADM that featured:

• 1x4 and 1x40 digital mirror arrays
• Switching time <1ms at 50V, 60Hz
• Single-crystal silicon structure (SOI)
• Highly reflective low-stress gold coating
• Optical Wafer Level Packaging with anti-reflective glass coating

Adaptive Optics

Beam focus or image correction requires precise adaptive optical elements. Tronics co-develops adaptive electrostatic optical membrane for multi-purpose applications.