A trench isolation technology employs trenches refilled with dielectric material to create, in a single layer, electrical isolation between mechanically joined components. This paper explores further use of this technology for MEMS fabrication, particularly the fabrication of electrostatic microactuators. Adding extra features to a two-mask trench isolation process new design opportunities, lik...

This paper presents the design and experimental validation of dc-dynamic biasing for > 50× switching time improvement in severely underdamped fringing-field electrostatic MEMS actuators. The electrostatic fringing-field actuator is used to demonstrate the concept due to its robust device design and inherently low damping conditions. In order to accurately quantify the gap height versus voltage ...

MEMS Inlet Valve for Portable Sensor Systems With funding support from DARPA, RTI developed the electrostatic “artificial eyelid” actuator, which has a diversity of applications including optical shutters, electrical switches, tunable capacitors, and microvalves. The artificial eyelid consists of a flexible curled film fabricated from polymer and metal layers which is anchored to a substrate (e...

This paper presents in-plane electrostatic comb-drive actuators with stroke as large as 245 μm that is achieved by employing a novel Clamped Paired Double Parallelogram (C-DPDP) flexure mechanism. For a given flexure beam length, comb gap, and actuation voltage, this is currently the largest comb-drive actuator stroke reported in the literature. The C-DP-DP flexure mechanism design offers high ...

Traditional MEMS filters use a comb drive structure that suffers from the pull-in instability, which places significant limitation on achievable signal-to-noise ratio of sensor. Because output signal capacitive sensor is linearly related to applied voltage, it desirable can withstand large voltages upwards 100 V. However, instability causes high destroy device and trade-off between performance ...

INTRODUCTION The comb-drive actuator is one of the main building blocks of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Its working principle is based on an electrostatic force that is generated between biased conductor plates as one moves relative to the other. Because of its capability of force generation, it finds wide application in micro-mechanical systems. Sample applications include polysilico...