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.

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:

• 1×4 and 1×40 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

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