Design and Development of a Double-Bridge Micromirror With Bending and Twisting Cantilevers for Multiobject Spectroscopy

Abstract

This article presents the design, development, and characterization of a double-bridge electrostatically actuated micromirror for multiobject spectroscopy (MOS). The proposed structure is an improvement over single-bridge micromirrors in terms of aperture size, pull-in voltage, degrees of freedom, and fill factor. The two-axis symmetric rotation mechanism of the proposed micromirror is achieved by bending and twisting action of the suspended cantilevers which is contrary to the twisting cantilevers of a conventional one-axis torsional micromirror. The placement of anchor and cantilevers under the mirror plate results in a high fill factor when arranged in a 2-D array. The analytical modeling, design optimization, and static and dynamic analysis are done using finite-element method (FEM) in Coventorware. An optimized design is fabricated using a simple approach of surface micromachining and electroplating. For a micromirror of size $200\,\,\mu \text{m}\,\,\times 200\,\,\mu \text{m}$ and the actuation gap of $2.5~\mu \text{m}$ , the device exhibits a tilt angle of 1.5° at a pull-in voltage of 23.1 V, a switching time of $38~\mu \text{s}$ , and the resonance frequency of 35.23 kHz. A ${3} \times {3}$ array of the micromirror is demonstrated with a fill factor of more than 95%. The deflection range can be increased by simply increasing the thickness of the sacrificial layer and without any major process modification.