Slashdot Mirror
Micromachines in Modern Use
dragons_flight writes: "Physics Today has a lengthy article on MEMS (microelectromechanical systems AKA micromachines) including the ways they are being put to use right now. Uses include airbag collision detectors in cars, pressure guages, "micro-microphones", video projection, scientific equipment, and the ever popular optical switching technology. In addition there are two brief sidebars discussing how micro- and macro-machines differ and the use of integrated circuit technology to build MEMS."
These mirrors flip up and down mechanically, right? That can't be much faster than KHz, whereas electronics switch on the order of MHz, I thought...
You could move a macroscopic mirror at a few kHz. Mirrors fabricated to be a few microns across can be switched much, much more quickly.
Even if your packet rate still ends up being much faster than the speed at which you can switch the mirror, you could still use this to eliminate a lot of decoding during routing. Instead of a box with N network attachments that decodes incoming traffic and sends it to x, y, or z destination as appropriate, you have a MEMS box that has one connection pattern for the first millisecond, another connection pattern for the next millisecond, and so on. If the routers generating the traffic are intelligent, they can group packets for a given destination into bursts so that they're routed automatically through the optical MEMS router. Alternatively, you could group packets and put a duration and a destination-identifier tag on it at a lower data rate. Embedded electronics in the MEMS chip can read the destination and move the mirror to the correct position for the duration of the burst of packets.
This won't eliminate the need for all electronic processing, but it will make several aspects of routing at high data rates much easier.
but then they go and claim that mirrors are wavelength insensitive. Perhaps regular mirrors are, but aren't high reflectivity mirrors wavelength sensitive (using interference effects from thin film coatings)? If they didn't use high reflectivity mirrors, wouldn't there be a huge loss to this switch?
Not really. You can always put an optical repeater (read: erbium-doped fiber laser) on all outgoing ports to compensate for dimming. You have to do this on long fiber runs anyways.
Good thought, though.