Design, fabrication and testing of a serial kinematic MEMSXYstage for multifinger manipulation

Abstract

In micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) it is difficult to obtain a large range of motion with a small coupled error. This limitation was overcome by designing and fabricating a nested structure as a serial kinematic mechanism (SKM). In this paper, a MEMS-based XY stage is reported for multifinger manipulation application. The SKM MEMS XY stage is implemented by embedding a single degree-of-freedom (DOF) stage into another single DOF stage. The proposed MEMS XY stage is fabricated by deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) from both sides of a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. This SKM MEMS stage has the capability to generate more than 50 μm displacements along each X-and Y-axes. This nested structure also suppressed the coupled motion error to 0.6% of the original actuation displacement. For the demonstration on the micro-particle manipulation, a 15 μm sized polypropylene particle is manipulated and rotated by operating two individual fingers attached to proposed MEMS stages.

Design of a 1 DOF MEMS motion stage for a parallel plane geometry rheometer

“…The expected force from the actuator, F act can be expressed based on a beam theory [20] and the geometric relationship between the lateral bar and two bent-type actuators as: $$F_{\mathit{act}}=\alpha \mathrm{normal\Delta }{T}_{\mathit{ave}}ETfalse(W_{\mathit{lateral}}\text{tan}\theta -2nW\text{sin}\theta false)$$ where α is coefficient of thermal expansion of silicon, Δ T ave is an average temperature rise of the actuator, W lateral is the beam width of the lateral beam and T is the thickness, and Θ is the beam angle of the bent-beam actuator. Based on these relationships, the main design parameters are set and listed in Table 1.…”

“…The material properties used in the FEA are cited from a previous publication [20] and the same wafers are utilized in the fabrication. In this simulation, the ends of the eight folded springs and the ends of the actuator are assumed to be firmly fixed for structural analysis and they are connected to a heat sink at room temperature of 20 °C for thermal analysis.…”

“…The fabrication process consists of four steps one metal deposition process on the device layer of a SOI wafer, two deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) processes for the device layer and the handle layer of an SOI wafer, and the removal process of a buried oxide layer. The details about this fabrication are described in details in a similar MEMS-based motion stage study [20]. …”

Experimental validation of in-hand planar orientation and translation in microscale

“…Indeed, in-hand manipulation allows to perform local rotations without using conventional rotation stages. Previous works have demonstrated the feasibility of automatic and semi-automatic handling using two [5]- [8], three [9] or four [10] probes having several degrees of freedom (DoF). However, the manipulated objects were limited to microspheres except in [9] where more complex objects have been manipulated using three probes having 6 DoF (two mobile fingers and a static one).…”

MEMS Nanopositioner for On-Chip Atomic Force Microscopy: A Serial Kinematic Design

“…There are a limited number of MEMS nanopositioners reported in the literature based on serial kinematic design for optical MEMS and manipulation applications [13], [14].…”