Feedback Control in Silicon Photonic MEMS

Abstract: In this report, we study the implementation of a feedback control system to stabilizea MEMS device for applications in programmable photonic circuits. Specifically, the controller wasimplemented on an all-pass ring resonator, as it was the most suitable MEMS device to implementthe control system on.This study aims to show that it is possible to stabilize MEMS using a feedback loop, therebyreducing their sensitivity to temperature and noise. We present a solution that uses a programmablehardware platform to implement a PI controller and conduct measurements to demonstrate theefficacy of the proposed approach.We experimentally show that it is possible to stabilize the MEMS using the feedback controller,but our results suggest that the MEMS device needs to display a linear response to the control signal.We also suggest improvements to the lab set-up that could further improve our results and workaround the non-linearity problem.