Publications

In this dissertation are described two types of micromechanical flexures for guiding mov- able micromechanical structures with applications to high-precision Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS), whose typical sizes are in the order of ...

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...