Comb Drive Designs with Minimized Levitation

This paper presents two capacitive comb drive designs for electrostatic actuation of MEMS with the aim to eliminate the levitation effect often observed in such systems. By placing a shield over the comb drive fingers, it is possible to balance the electric field and suppress vertical forces while m...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: del Corro, Pablo Guillermo, Imoden, Matthias, Bishop, David J., Pastoriza, Hernan
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:Argentina
Institución:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repositorio:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/79033
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/79033
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Actuators
Comb Drives
Levitation
Mems
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2.2
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2
Descripción
Sumario:This paper presents two capacitive comb drive designs for electrostatic actuation of MEMS with the aim to eliminate the levitation effect often observed in such systems. By placing a shield over the comb drive fingers, it is possible to balance the electric field and suppress vertical forces while maintaining the desired lateral motion. By optimizing the comb geometry, we demonstrate that our approach is able to reduce the levitation by an order of magnitude and unwanted coupling of motion from out-of-plane to in-plane by a factor of 7 compared with standard comb architectures fabricated using PolyMUMPs technology, without the need of alternating comb finger polarities or additional control electrodes. Levitation was reduced to 160 nm, for 3.6 μm lateral displacement at a driving voltage of 80 V. [2016-0156]