A hybrid vertical comb-drive actuator supported by flexible pdms suspensions

In this work, we proposed a hybrid PDMS-silicon electrostatic actuator with a large stroke under low driving voltages. The device features a staggered vertical comb-drive suspended by PDMS springs. Because of the flexibility of PDMS, an initial staggered displacement was naturally formed due to the self-weight of the device. Experimental results showed that the combination of polymeric springs and silicon structures enabled the large stroke of 3.73 µm at 3.5 kHz. The presented heterogeneous integration technology improves the performance and may bring new functionalities to micro-systems.