Publications

Large Displacement Electrostatic Microactuators With Polysilicon Flexure Suspensions

Reid Alyn Brennen
Albert P. Pisano
Roger T. Howe
Homayoon Kazerooni
1993

Two electrostatically-driven surface-micromachined microactuators designed for large displacement motion are presented along with a literature review of microactuators that includes over 300 references. The first polycrystalline silicon device, the semaphore, achieves large amplitudes by resonant excitation of a plate mass attached to the end of a cantilever beam. The semaphore is driven by either linear or curved electrostatic comb drives. The second device, the tangential drive, uses the direct electrostatic force between two charged bars to attain large static displacements in one of...

Design, Fabrication, Position Sensing, and Control of Electrostatic, Surface-Micromachined Polysilicon Microactuators

Patrick Ching-Pak Cheung
Roberto Horowitz
Roger T. Howe
Albert P. Pisano
1995
This dissertation describes the design, fabrication, position sensing, and control of an electrostatically-driven microactuator. The polysilicon microactuator, together with an on-chip electronic buffer, were fabricated by the Modular ...

Fluidic Microsystems Fabricated in Epoxy

Nelson Kuan
Albert P. Pisano
Dorian Liepmann
Susan J. Muller
2001
SU-8 epoxy was applied in fabricating microfluidic systems through a low-cost and robust process. The complete fabrication and packaging process is introduced in this work and further highlighted by the presentation of two application examples: a static fluidic structure design ...

Surface Treatments for Adhesion Reduction in Polysilicon Micromechanical Devices

Michael Robert Houston
Roya Maboudian
Roger T. Howe
David B. Graves
1996
This work investigates the interactions between polysilicon surfaces for the purpose of alleviating the strong interfacial adhesion present between contacting microstructure sufaces, a problem referred to as stiction. Without specifically-designed...

Control of Fluids in Microscale Devices

Michael James DeBar
Dorian Liepmann
Albert P. Pisano
Richard M. White
2001
Pumping in microdevices due to gradients in surface tension was investigated both theoretically and experimentally. When a gradient in surface tension exists along an interface between two fluids, there is a net motion of the interface. The...

Micro-Optical Devices for Communications and Beyond

Meng-Hsiung Kiang
Kam Y. Lau
Richard S. Muller
Raymond Y. Chiao
1998
The area of micro-optics covers a variety of techniques used for developing miniaturized optical components and systems for applications ranging from optical communications and information processing and storage, to biomedical instrumentation...

Integrated Micromachinery -- Moving Structures on Silicon Chips

Long-Sheng Fan
Richard S. Muller
1990

Some basic issues of integrated micromachinery -- microassembly, material, and actuation, have been studied. This manuscript describes four new techniques in surface micromachining: l. in situ assembly and the use of multiple sacrificial layers,...

Selective Encapsulations of MEMS: Micro Channels, Needles, Resonators and Electromechanical Filters

Liwei Lin
Albert P. Pisano
Roger T. Howe
Van P. Carey
1993
Surface and combined surface/bulk micromachining techniques are developed for selectively encapsulated micro devices including micro flow channels, micro hypodermic needles, hermetically sealed lateral micro resonators and electromechanical filters. As part of...

Microscale and Nanoscale Neural Interfaces

Karen Chihrnin Cheung
Luke P. Lee
Rajendra Bhatnagar
Yang Dan
Albert P. Pisano
2002
In order to mitigate the effccts of neurological disability, new neural interfaces are actively being developed. We present several new neural interfaces which can be used in both implantable and on-chip devices. ...

MEMS Based Micro-Capillary Pumped Loop for Chip-Level Temperature Control

Jeffrey Alan Kirshberg
Dorian Liepmann
Ralph Greif
Luke P. Lee
Kirk Yerkes
2000

Utilizing current Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technologies, a three-port micro-capillary pumped loop (micro-CPL) was designed, fabricated and tested to provide integral cooling to electronics or MEMS type devices. The two wafer design consists of...