| The progression of the MEMS (micro electromechanical systems) field has provided tremendous advances in integrated micromachined systems. An effort to design and build organic microactuator arrays capable of moving or handling small objects is reported. The microactuators were fabricated using surface micromachining techniques and once completed can produce motion both in and out of the substrate plane. Two different devices, called ciliary arrays, were fabricated in this effort.; The first ciliary array had both thermal and electrostatic means of actuation in order to take advantage of the relative strengths of two different methods of actuation. Integrating four orthogonally oriented actuators into a unit cell and replicating this cell into an array resulted in a planar array that could move objects along two degrees of freedom. In addition, by tiling together two or more ciliary arrays into a composite array, object manipulations based on the theory of programmable vector fields were conducted including orienting, rotating, and centering.; The second array had actuators designed to operate only with thermal means. In addition, it was first micromachined array with co-fabricated with CMOS circuitry. That is, the cilia were fabricated directly above the CMOS selection and drive circuitry. The random-access selection and activation of actuators in this array showed that integration was successful. This array was able to do simple linear and diagonal translations as well as vector-field manipulations such as squeeze-, centering-, and rotating-fields at arbitrary locations on a single chip. |
