Planar fabrication of multilayer piezoelectric actuator by groove cutting and electroplating

This paper reports a new planar fabrication method of multilayer piezoelectric actuator. In this method, three techniques, dicing, electroplating and laser assisted etching (LAE), were used for constructing the multilayer structure. Prototype actuators with 23-120 active layers were fabricated in this method. The measured displacement was 2.5 /spl mu/m (23 layers) and 7.3 /spl mu/m (120 layers) at 100 V, respectively. These values agree with the calculated values from the piezoelectric properties of the material.