A Novel Out-of-Plane Electrothermal Bistable Microactuator

Abstract

This paper reports an out-of-plane bistable electrothermal microactautor that is comprised of inverted-series-connected (ISC) Cu/W-based multimorphs. S-shaped ISC multimorphs have been previously employed for generating large vertical displacement. In this work, the ISC multimorphs have been engineered into a warped shape via pre-stressed W and unbalanced SiO2 encapsulation layers. Electrothermal bistable actuators based on the warped ISC multimorphs have been fabricated and tested. A bistable vertical displacement of 25 μm has been obtained.