Self-aligned mirror and V-grooves in free-space micromachined optical switches

A new micromachining process is described that guarantees highly accurate optical alignment in the free-space optics of matrix switches. This process is demonstrated using a 2/spl times/2 elementary cell, which is easily scalable to a larger M/spl times/N matrix. Promising performances such as low insertion loss (0.30-0.70 dB) and a fast switching time (300 /spl mu/s) are obtained.