Electrostatic Torsional Micromirror With Enhanced Tilting Angle Using Active Control Methods

Electrostatic microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based torsional micromirrors are a fundamental building block for many optical network applications, such as optical wavelength-selective switches, configurable optical add-drop multiplexers and optical cross-connects. Although the device architecture, materials and fabrication processes determine the micromirrors´ functioning space, one major technical challenge to achieving their full performance potentials is the controllability and stability of the tilting angle. In this paper, an electrostatic micromirror is designed and fabricated using a standard MEMS silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process. Active control approaches including gain scheduling and nonlinear proportional and derivative (PD) control are proposed. Both approaches can improve the performance of the mirror tilting and enhance the robustness of the structures to any stochastic perturbations. Furthermore, the nonlinear PD control can eliminate the micromirror “pull-in” phenomenon, hence significantly expanding the mirror tilt range, and as a result achieving enhanced device performance and functionality. The nonlinear PD control method is experimentally implemented and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.