Shining Light On (And Through) MEMS

An unnamed correspondent pointed out this story at Red Herring about the small-but-not-nanotech devices known as MEMS (microelectromechanical systems). The article focuses on the use that these devices can have in the form of switches enabling optical routing. At present, despite the huge carrying capacity of fiber optics, routing their signals is slower to accomplish and less developed in general than that for data sent as electrical signals. (But on what planet are devices 1-10 millimeters in size "smaller than the width of a human hair"?)

Comments

Re:Why the 'human hair'?

[squiggleslash]

Well, 1 human hair is exactly one US billionth of the volume of a small car. The actual scale is:

• 1,000,000,000,000 human hairs = small car
• 10 small cars = small truck
• 100 trucks = football pitch
• 1000 football pitches = New York City
• 100,000 New York Cities = Texas

It's pretty obvious when you think about it...

--

SciAm's current issue.

[interiot]

Scientific American's current issue contains several articles on optical networks and prospects for switching and routing them without electronics.
--

fiber optic slowness

[jpostel]

The slowness of fiber optic switching is due to the fact that it is currently done by converting the signal to electrical, switching it, then converting back to optical. There are many technologies currently in development to take care of many of the problems with optical switching. The problem with them is that they have been in development for a while now. I was working on opto-electronic modulator research at Bell Labs in 1996 and the technology is still not widely used. Like most really cool technology, it will be a while before we see any of this in wide spread use.