Bi-directionally Driven Metal Cantilevers Developed for Optical Actuation

In this paper we report a silicon solar-cell array to generate voltage (about 4.8 V by 16 series PIN diode) to drive cantilever actuators made of stress-controlled combination of chromium-gold-chromium layers for electro-thermal pull-up and electrostatic pull-down motion. The silicon PIN layer was developed by the epitaxial growth on an SOI (silicon-on-insulator) wafer. The metal cantilever actuator was developed by using the reverse sputtering process to minimize the performance variation associated with the patterning error. The bi-directional actuator was developed for potential use in AFM-based data storage.