Design and Fabrication of a Horizontal Thermal Micro-Actuator with Integrated Micro tweezers

Micro tweezers are one of the microsystems technology applications and typically used for handling micro parts and manipulated small objects. Microactuators such as thermal microactuator are mainly used to drive the micro tweezers. This paper present the design, simulation, fabrication and characterization of a new developed two hot arms thermal micro actuator with integrated micro tweezers. The advantages of this new micro actuator with integrated tweezers are, the actuator flexure is not more part of the actuation loop and the electric current only passes through the inner and outer thin hot arms of the actuators which have a high electrical resistance. The actuator efficiency will increases dramatically since all applied power will contribute to the tweezers movement. Further more, a heat dissipation element which act as a heat radiator was introduced to decrease the heat transfer to the tweezers which is strongly required in some applications. The device was fabricated out of silicon substrate by inductively coupled plasma etching process. The device showed very good controlling ability during its operation and a good agreement between experimental and simulation results was achieved.