Beam steering and deflecting device using step-based micro-blazed grating

The rapidly evolving demands of optical communications and optical switching systems have created a new market for high capacity all-optical beam steering and deflecting techniques. One technology potentially capable of realizing such systems uses the multistep micro-blazed grating optical beam deflectors based on binary and multiple-phase modulation methods. The micro-optical element has been fabricated by introducing very large scale integration (VLSI), stepping photolithography and reactive ion etching (RIE), which can realize beam steering, deflecting, splitting, and switching in free space, and its diffraction properties are determined by the blazed-grating parameters, such as the number of steps, grating depth, grating period, as well as blazed profile. The theoretical analysis and primarily experimental result show that this phase-type element has the advantages of high diffractive efficiency, low cross talk, small feature size, and high reliability due to nonmechanical beam steering without any moving parts. Hence it is ideally suited to applications in optical communication and optical interconnection network.