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Technology Stocks : JDS Uniphase (JDSU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg Hull who wrote (4565)	1/17/2000 7:25:00 PM
From: Bill Holtzman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24042

Greg, Here's what I know about MEMs from MIT Technology Review, my favorite magazine. techreview.com Others predict they are on the verge of using MEMS to transform the communication infrastructure based on optical fibers and other light-based technologies. Considering that the light-carrying core of optical fibers is about 9 micrometers in diameter, it's no surprise that systems engineers at places like Lucent Technologies would look to diminutive devices to help them steer light through fiber networks. We believe MEMS is going to really revolutionize how photonic switching gets done, says David Bishop, head of microstructure physics research at Lucent's Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. Some of the first of these microswitches for light could show up in the communication network in the next year or so, says Bishop. For the moment, optical switches are heavy and expensive pieces of equipment, explains Bishop. Some involve just taking the end of a fiber, connecting it to a motor and you move it [from one fiber to another] that way. Instead of moving the fibers, MEMS promises more elegant, cheap and reliable ways of optical switching using tiny mirrors and lenses, in other words, by guiding the light. The nice thing about photons is they are small and don't weigh much, so you can use a micromachine to move them around, says Bishop. In one MEMS design, Bishop and colleagues have fabricated a "thermally deformable micromirror" that can change its focal distance. Smaller than a poppy seed, it looks like a radar dish with eight individually tiltable triangular wedges (each made of gold-coated silicon). With this design, light coming from eight fibers can be precisely recombined (multiplexed) into downstream fibers positioned at several of the adjustable mirrors' focal points. Devices like these could help reduce the vulnerability of photonic networks to failure. If an optical fiber gets severed in the middle of the night, explains Bishop, you would like to be able to reconfigure the path of light in that network without having to send a truck out to fix the fiber. As Bishop sees it, pressing a button that sends a little jolt of light or electricity to the invisible wires of a poppy-seed-sized mirror might be all it will take to reroute the light and keep the lines open. So how do you read this? To me, it sounds like a mechanical system, just as the words "Microelectricomechanical system" imply. I'm not sure what I meant by solid state (!), except that it would have no moving parts. I have no idea how that could be accomplished. It just seems to me that reliability must be high in these things and I believe mechanical systems as a rule are less reliable than solid state. Of course, 1) I could be totally wrong 2) As suggested in the article, a network can have lots of redundancy and as a result be very reliable. Just my thoughts.