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Flexible, Dry-Released Process For Aluminum Electrostatic Actuators, Christopher Storment, David Borkholder, Victor Westerlind

Articles

We present an all-aluminum MEMS process (Al- MEMS) for the fabrication of large-gap electrostatic actuators with process steps that are compatible with the future use of underlying, pre-fabricated CMOS control circuitry. The process is purely additive above the substrate as opposed to processes that depend on etching pits into the silicon, and thereby permits a high degree of design freedom. Multilayer aluminum metalization is used with organic sacrificial layers to build up the actuator structures. Oxygen-based dry etching is used to remove the sacrificial layers. While this approach has been previously used by other investigators to fabricate optical modulators and …