Electrostatic comb-drive actuators, which feature easy design, fabrication and implementation, are an important type of actuators. They have been used in various application fields, such as optical communication [1], biomedical engineering [2], wireless communication [3] and nanotechnology [4]. A longer traveling distance and a larger force output are two major concerns in developing comb-drive actuators. In the last two plus decades, many research efforts were devoted to improve these two major performance factors. These efforts can be grouped into four main directions: optimizing the finger shape [5], modifying the spring shape [6], modifying the configuration of finger overlaps [7] and creating new actuation methods [8].

Recently, besides the abovementioned directions, some low stiffness materials, such as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and SU-8, were used to construct the springs of comb-drive actuators to obtain larger displacements [9,10]. Although the expected advantage of using low stiffness materials (usually nonconductive) is achieved, the comb electrodes of the rotor are inevitably isolated. An extra process of metal deposition is required to make the rotor's finger electrodes electrically connected with outside circuits once again. During operations, the thin metal layers likely have the risk of delamination. The drawback of the bilayer springs makes the heterogeneous comb-drive actuators unreliable. A suitable method should be developed to cancel the drawback.

To eliminate the drawback, a capacitively-coupled-power driven comb-drive actuator (see Figure 1), whose rotor requires no electrical interconnection, was proposed in this article. In the following sections, the concept and design of the actuator will be explained and analyzed first. Then, the tests for the fabricated actuators will be described, and the results will be discussed. Finally, the conclusions will be made.

One way to deliver power to the rotor without electrical interconnection is using a capacitive coupling with the stators. Capacitively-coupled-power has been successfully used to drive microrobots in the MEMS area [11]. To achieve this, we treated the stators and rotor of the comb-drive actuator as a sequence of insulated electrodes, as shown in Figure 1. When different voltages are applied to the stators, the rotor, the stators and the handle layer form a capacitive circuit. The potential (V_r) induced on the rotor is determined by the voltages applied on the two stators using the following equation: (1) V r = V 1 C 1 + V 2 C 2 C 1 + C 2 + C rwhere V₁ and V₂ represent the applied voltages, and C₁, C₂ and C_r represent the capacitances. Although V_r is floating, its value can be definitely determined by Equation (1), i.e., it is dependent on V₁ and V₂. Possible variation of V_r may arise from the parasitic capacitance that exists in the device. This issue can be removed by careful design to avoid any parasitic capacitance.

If the voltages V₁ and V₂ are different, the voltage differences between the rotor and the low-voltage and high-voltage stators will be different. The voltage differences bring about different attraction forces on two sides of the rotor. Then, the rotor will be moved to the position where the balance between the mechanical and the electrostatic forces achieves.

By Equation (1), the influence of C_r can be observed. As C_r approaches zero, then: (2) V r = V 1 C 1 + V 2 C 2 C 1 + C 2and V_r will be determined by V₁, V₂, C₁ and C₂. This can be achieved by removing the handle layer under the movable part and isolating the rotor's anchors from the stators' anchors. Extra etching and bonding processes are required to do so. In this case, the asymmetric configuration of finger overlap is necessary to generate an initial difference between C₁ and C₂, and then an initial difference between |V_r – V₁| and |V_r – V₂|. Without the asymmetric configuration, the actuator will not be actuated. As C_r approaches infinity, then: (3) V r ≅ V 1 C 1 + V 2 C 2 C r

Namely, V_r will approach zero. This can be achieved by significantly increasing the areas of the rotor's anchors. It is easy to estimate V_r in this case. However, the excessive device area makes this case not suitable to be implemented. In this article, C_r was neither close to zero nor infinity, hence Equation (1) was used as the basic formula to obtain V_r.

Note that when non-conductive materials are used to construct the springs of comb-drive actuators, C_r is determined by the area of the movable structure. C_r will never approach infinity. Equation (1) will also be used as the basic formula to obtain V_r.

To verify the new actuation mechanism, we fabricated some comb-drive actuators using the one mask process based on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer with a device layer of 50 μm and a buried oxide layer of 4 μm. The structure of the comb drive actuator was patterned and etched by deep reactive-ion etching (DRIE), then released with hydrofluoric acid (HF) etching to remove the sacrificial oxide. Figure 3 shows a microscope image of the actuator with asymmetric initial overlaps.

The feasibility of the actuation mechanism was demonstrated by the operation of the comb-drive actuator. The voltages were only applied on the stators and the rotor was completely insulated. The handle layer was grounded to ensure that its voltage is zero. Before applying the dc voltages, the rotor was static, as shown in Figure 4(a). Increasing the dc voltage at only one stator, i.e., increasing V₁, resulted in an increasing F_ex, and thus the rotor motion (see Figure 4(b)).

Figure 5 shows the relationship between the displacement of the rotor and the applied voltage. The displacement of the rotor was measured using a high resolution microscope (on the probe station). The experimental results agree well with the estimated ones. When the applied voltage (V₁) was increased to 72 volts, the displacement approached to 41.7 μm. The static responses verify that without electrical interconnections the rotor still can be driven using the capacitively-coupled-power delivery mechanism.

The performance of the proposed actuation mechanism was also characterized by the dynamic response of the fabricated actuator. Through the capacitive coupling, the actuator was driven by a dc voltage (V₂ = 5 volts) and an ac voltage (V₁ = 20sinωt volt, where ω represents the radian frequency) in air. The dynamic behavior was observed using a MEMS motion analyzer, i.e., an in-plane strobe scope module. Figure 6 shows that the measured resonant frequency of the actuator—which was driven by the applied ac voltage with a frequency ranging from 300 to 1,000 Hz—is 577 Hz, which is close to the estimated value: 615 Hz. The dynamic response further demonstrates that the new actuation mechanism is feasible in dynamic actuation. Note that the difference between the theoretical and experimental results may result from the nonlinear relationship between the electrostatic force and the displacement x. However, the potential effects, such as spring hardening and softening, are out of scope of the current work and left to be a topic of future work.

Asymmetric comb-drive actuators were successfully designed, fabricated and implemented using the actuation mechanism, which takes advantage of the capacitive coupling inherent existing in the comb-drive actuator. The capacitively-coupled-power delivery was successfully used to drive the new actuators, whose static displacement and natural frequency can be predicted from the analytical solutions. The experimental results verified the theoretical analysis. Using this method, the rotor can be fully insulated, i.e., the comb-drive actuators containing heterogeneous structures (e.g., flexible and insulating folded beams) become more practical and promising to have an impact on MEMS technology.