Electrostatic, comb-drive actuators have been designed for applications requiring displacements of up to 150 μm in less than 1 msec. A nonlinear model of the actuator relates the resonant frequency and the maximum stable deflection to the actuator dimensions. A suite of experiments that were carried out on DRIE, single-crystal silicon, comb-drive actuators confirm the validity of the model. Fou...

A novel MEMS-based electrostatic actuator design is proposed for recording head fly height control below 10 nm. Different from prior work on MEMS-based electrostatic microactuators designed for magnetic hard disk drives (HDD), the proposed microactuator is fabricated monolithically with a conventional head/slider design. The actuator is micromachined into the same side as the head element on a ...

A continuing trend these days is the use of micro-electro-mechanical actuators with electronic circuitry to fabricate MEMS devices such as micro-switches, hard disks, optical micro-mirrors ... One of the problems with the electrostatic MEMS actuator is that when an electrical voltage is applied to these devices, the micro-actuators undergo a residual vibration before reaching their permanent po...

Advancements in Sugar include 1) parameterizable netlists, 2) nonlinear frequency response analysis, 3) subnets, 4) improved MNA, 5) reduced order modeling, and 6) a more accurate nonlinear beam model. Examples of these features include the simulation of a two-axis mirror with over 10,000 degrees of freedom, the reduced order modeling applied of an electrostatic gap actuator, the parameterized ...