Design, fabrication, and characterization of electrostatic comb-drive actuators for nanoelectromechanical silicon photonics

Abstract: Nanoelectromechanical systems offer unique functionalities in photonics: The ability to elastically and reversibly deform dielectric beams with subwavelength dimensions enable electrical control of the propagation of light with a power consumption orders of magnitude below that of competing technologies, such as thermo-optic tuning. We present a study of the design, fabrication, and characterization of compact electrostatic comb-drive actuators tailored for integrated nanoelectromechanical silicon photonic circuits. Our design has a footprint of $1.2 \times 10^{3} \mu$m$^{2}$ and is found to reach displacements beyond 50 nm at 5 V with a mechanical resonance above 200 kHz, or, using different spring constants and skeletonization, a mechanical resonance above 2.5 MHz with displacements beyond 50 nm at 28 V. This is sufficient to induce very large phase shifts and other optical effects in nanoelectromechanical reconfigurable photonic circuits.