GaAs-based micromachining is a very attractive technique for integrating mechanical structures and active optical devices, such as laser diodes and photodiodes. For monolithically integrating mechanical parts onto laser diode wafers, the micromachining technique must be compatible with the laser diode fabrication process. Our micromachining technique features three major processes: epitaxitial growth (MOVPE) for both the structural and sacrificial layers, reactive dry-etching by chlorine for high-aspect, three-dimensional structures, and selective wet-etching by peroxide/ammonium hydroxide solution to release the moving parts. These processes are compatible with laser fabrication, so a cantilever beam structure can be fabricated at the same time as a laser diode structure. Furthermore, a single-crystal epitaxial layer has little residual stress, so precise microstructures can be obtained without significant deformation. We fabricated a microbeam resonator sensor composed of two laser diodes, a photodiode, and a micro-cantilever beam with an area of 400700 µm. The cantilever beam is 3 µm wide, 5 µm high, and either 110µm long for a 200-kHz resonant frequency or 50 µm long for a 1-MHz resonant frequency. The cantilever beam is excited by an intensity-modulated laser beam from an integrated excitation laser diode; the vibration signal is detected by a coupled cavity laser diode and a photodiode.

A thermally controlled magnetization actuator (TCMA) is proposed for micro-mechanical relays. It is actuated by changing the local magnetization of the structure by remote heating using a laser beam. It is fabricated by nickel surface micromachining (a fabrication technique using nickel electroplating). The optical power of the laser diode used to drive the TCMA is about 30 mW. The switching time of the microrelay was experimentally measured to be 10 ms, the same as that of a conventional mechanical relay. The contact force was calculated to be 20 µN, which can be improved by increasing the size of the TCMA.

We propose a mechanically tunable passively mode-locked semiconductor laser with a high repetition rate using a simple configuration with a moving mirror located very close to a laser facet. This scheme is demonstrated for the first time by a novel micromechanical laser consisting of an InGaAsP/InP multisegment laser with a monolithic moving micro-mirror driven by an electrostatic comb structure. The main advantage of this laser is the capability of generating high-quality mode-locked pulses stabilized by a phase-locked loop (PLL) with low residual phase noise in a wide repetition-rate tuning range. This paper describes the basic concept and tuning performances utilizing the micromechanical passively mode-locked laser in 22-GHz fundamental mode-locking and in its second-harmonic mode-locking.