Full-Gap Positioning of Parallel-Plate Electrostatic MEMS Using On-off Control

Electrostatic parallel-plate actuators are classically limited to displacements up to 1/3 of the gap due to the pull-in effect [1],[2|. A closed-loop feedback based method presented in [3] is recently introduced to overcome this limitation. Optimized structures are designed to minimize residual position ripple while maintaining bandwidth, effectively reducing the required device size of positioning electrostatic actuators by a factor three.