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MEMS stands for Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems.
MEMS technology has been developed for several decades. It has been greatly benefited from the fabrication technologies developed by the semiconductor integrate chip industry.
One of applications for MEMS devices in optical fiber communications is in making optical switches with large port numbers. MEMS technology is capable of producing very fast, low insertion loss, wide operating wavelength range and long life optical switch unit with large scale of switching ports on a very compact miniature chip.
With the mature of MEMS technology, optical switches with MEMS core have entered the commercial markets. The advantage of MEMS optical switch is more apparent when the number of switch ports is high, i.e. greater than 1x16. Because the switch core is an integrated chip, the MEMS switches are compact, reliable, fast. But with other type of switches (such as conventional mechanical switches, solid state switches, etc.), large switches are constructed using small units such as 1x2 or 2x2 ones. Cascading too many small switches, the performance, such as reliability, speed, insertion loss, will be significantly degraded.
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