TUNABLE DIELECTROPHORETIC MICROLENS WITH LOWERED DRIVING VOLTAGE

This paper reports on a novel double-sided design of an electrode structure that drives a tunable liquid microlens based on the dielectrophoretic force. The clear advantage of our double-sided design over previously reported conventional single-sided design of electrodes for tunable electro-hydrodynamic lenses is the much lower driving voltage, given similar device scale on the order of 1mm of lens diameter. In our fabricated lenses, the contact angle changed from 4 degrees to 18 degrees, tuning the focal length from 67 mm to 14 mm, when the voltage increased from 0 to 25 V-rms, which is lower than most of previous work by at least a factor of four.