A micromachined loudspeaker for audible acoustic instruments is designed, fabricated and tested. A single loop voice coil on a flexible polyimide membrane is conceived to serve as the sound generating plate, and is driven by electromagnetic actuation. The diameter of the microspeaker is 5 mm × 5 mm, and it is fabricated by a low temperature micromachining process. At a driving voltage of as low...

An electro-thermal micro-gripper for both in-plane clamping and out-of-plane motion is presented. The device consists of both in-plane and out-of-plane actuators. Each gripper arm performs a 7.4 μm in-plane and a 14 μm out-of-plane motion at 1.6 V and 2.5V actuation voltage, respectively. The maximum temperature and power consumption are 180 °C and 26.5 mW and 80 °C and 87.3mW for the in-plane ...

In this investigation we develop a mathematical model to simulate the actuation of a multilayer metallic strip. In the first step of the model development, we employ the theory of Judy [4] and Timoshenko [5] to quantify the radius of curvature in the unimorph due to differing thermal coefficients in the constituent materials. The resulting radius of curvature is subsequently used to compute the...

 This paper analyses the mechanical behaviour of various suspensions of electrostatically actuated RF MEMS switches. A family of capacitive switches is described, with suspensions varying step by step from cantilevers to meander shaped double clamped beams. The result is a capacitive shunt switch with a designed actuation voltage of 4.5 V, and 20dB isolation and 0.04 dB insertion loss at a fre...

We present an electrically actuated tunable optical grating based on dielectric elastomer actuators. A simple fabrication protocol is presented, which integrates the grating with the actuating mechanism both made of soft elastomers, improving the tunability of the grating. The device is designed to be operated in the transmission mode. It exhibits a continuous period tunability of 34.4% at an a...

A versatile MEMS micro-mirror for optical platforms is presented, that operates using Lorentz force for actuation, resulting in low voltage operation. While maintaining below 20 mA drive current, this mirror has a tilting angle of over 50° and 20° around two diagonal axes and a linear motion of 1.5 mm in vertical axis. Compared to other works, it has larger angle of rotation and additional out ...

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An actuator design for beam steering micromirrors is reported. Coarse positioning is achieved with a 4-bit mechanical digital to analog converter [1]. The exact position is sensed by a set of lateral comb fingers and controlled through the leastsignificant bit of the DAC, which is embedded in a feedback loop. The actuator is designed for bilateral actuation of +/3μm with a resolution of 6nm pro...

This work reports on the fabrication process and measurements of a novel radio frequency microelectromechanical system (RF MEMS) capacitive shunt switch prototype with a mechanically unconstrained armature. The prototype is fabricated in a low cost process based on a printed circuit board (PCB) bonded to a glass slide. The minimum actuation voltage (Vact) of the prototype is 93V, with a switchi...

In this paper we develop a mathematical model to simulate the actuation of a multilayer metallic strip. In the first step of the model development, we employ the theory of Judy [4] and Timoshenko [5] to quantify the radius of curvature in the unimorph due to differing thermal coefficients in the constituent materials. The resulting radius of curvature is subsequently used to compute the voltage...