Dry release fabrication and testing of SiC electrostatic cantilever actuators

Abstract

This paper presents a simple, dry etching-based surface micromachining technique for the fabrication of single-layer polycrystalline 3C–SiC electrostatic actuators. The technique has utilized a single inductively coupled plasma recipe to etch and release metal patterned SiC structural layers. To demonstrate the simplicity of the process, SiC cantilever actuators with different beam lengths have been successfully fabricated using this method. By applying a combination of ac and dc voltages, the fabricated devices have been electrostatically actuated. The fundamental resonance frequencies of fabricated cantilevers with different lengths have been observed to range from 66.65 KHz to 1.729 MHz. The amplitudes of the fundamental resonance peaks with respect to the excitation voltages have also been systematically studied.