Fabrication of high aspect ratio microcoils for electromagnetic actuators

The demand for micro-fabricated components and devices is continually increasing. Actuators can occupy a large volume and be a large part of the weight of an overall system, and therefore need to be reduced in size. However, there has been little progress in fabricating microactuators using existing technologies. Then, we have fabricated spiral microcoils with a narrow pitch and high aspect ratio structure for an electromagnetic type actuator using X-ray lithography and metallization techniques. We fabricated coils with 10 ¿m width coil lines with an aspect ratio of over 5. We also estimated the suction force of actuators using these microcoils. It is expected that these high aspect ratio microcoils would be capable of delivering high performance in spite of their miniature size.