Patent ID: 7283709

Claim:
An optical apparatus for switching a multi-wave input optical signal of N channels comprising: a planar integrated lightwave circuit (PLC) including K+1 input/output waveguides, where K is an integer greater than or equal to one; K+1 dispersive waveguide arrays, each waveguide array including a coupler coupled to a different one of the K+1 input/output waveguides, an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) connected at a first end to the coupler and connected at a second end to a first surface of a common confocal coupler; and an array of N solid-immersion micromirror (SIM) devices, where N is an integer greater than one, each SIM device placed at a different location on a second opposing surface of the common confocal coupler and each SIM device having a respective actuator for providing independently controllable rotation, such that the light of one channel received by any one SIM device, from a first dispersive waveguide array is selectively reflected back through a second dispersive waveguide array connected to the first surface of the common confocal coupler.