A novel low-voltage large-displacement bulk silicon comb-drive actuator based on post-CMOS process

Abstract

This paper presents a novel low-voltage large-displacement bulk silicon MEMS comb-drive actuator. The non-initial overlap and unequal wide comb fingers of the actuator are firstly utilized to reduce the side instability and to improve the maximum stable displacement of the actuator. Compared with other comb-drive actuators, an optimal cascade folded beam and the fabrication tolerances are used to achieve the displacement of more than 50μm at 24V driving within a relatively small size. The layout size of the actuator is 1.14mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> . The comb-drive actuators are fabricated using a post-CMOS process based on Au-Au bonding technology.