We review our recent work on compact and low power silicon photonic components based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and implemented in imec’s iSiPP50G foundry platform. Large scale reconfigurability is attractive for emerging applications such as photonic accelerators for AI workloads. However, the large power consumption and footprint of current components prohibits scaling to large circuits. Silicon MEMS offer 10000x lower power consumption, a small footprint, and excellent mechanics. We show phase shifters, couplers, and wavelength filters . The devices have small footprints of a few tens of micrometers per side, low insertion losses of the order of 0.1 dB and time constants of the order of 1 µs.
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