Using silicon photonics to connect blades, boards, chips and eventually cores on the same chip has become a strategic goal for Hewlett-Packard Co. HP Labs' photonics technologies were described at its first annual Photonic Interconnect Forum. By harnessing its expertise in nano-imprint lithography to fashion low-cost, high-speed silicon photonic devices, HP said it hopes to seed the fledgling community of optical interconnect component makers. To keep a free-space photonic interconnect in focus, despite vibrations, HP is fabricating a MEMS micro-lens (shown here in a scanning electron microscope [SEM] image). The MEMS micro-lens scanner device was fabricated from silicon-on-insulator material by HP Labs and the University of California, at Berkeley and Davis. The electrostatic micro-lens scanner was based on comb drive actuators and vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), enabling adaptive optical beam tracking in the presence of mechanical vibration. The researchers demonstrated optical beam positioning noise reduction of approximately 20 dB, with a 400-Hz bandwidth in the presence of up to a 3g vibration.

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