Design and fabrication of microactuators for high density data storage

The design and fabrication of mm-sized MEMS actuator structures is described. A one-mm-sized microfabricated actuator is capable of linearized output of 0.2 mN when driven at 60 Volts by using an area-efficient electrostatic design, a high-aspect ratio microfabrication process, and a large signal linearization scheme. This increased output force enables the batch-fabricated microactuators to be used in practical applications in which the microactuators are required to move an external load. This paper concentrates on the design and process issues of the microactuators used as the fine actuator in a two-stage servo system for the high bandwidth positioning of a magnetic recording head slider. Other devices made by the same process technology are fully-integrated wobble micromotors and wobble actuators with potential applications in chip-sized disk drives using tip-based high density data storage.