Engineering a Compliant Mechanical Amplifier for MEMS Sensor Applications

In this paper, we introduce a compliant mechanical amplifier (mechAMP) suitable for the sensitivity enhancement in MEMS sensor applications. The design, fabrication and characterization of a planar compliant amplifier mechanism is presented with special focus on the kinematic and static system modelling of the displacement and force amplification. We show that the proposed system can also be applied as mechanical stiffness transformer for the adaption of mechanical signals or as mechanical transformer for MEMS actuators. Based on a kinematic model, a compact mechanism with a system size of 930 μm × 2080 μm and a displacement amplification ratio of 200 with an output displacement in a range of 100 μm was designed. The fabrication of the system was carried out using silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. Experimentally, we could verify an amplification ratio of 197.9 for the designed and fabricated system which corresponds to the analytic model by a deviation of about 1%.