Improvement of power consumption and lifetime characteristics of SDA rotary micromotor

This paper presents a new design and fabrication of scratch drive actuator (SDA) micro rotary motor with low driving voltage and high lifetime characteristics. To substantially reduce the driving-voltage from 30~150 V_o-p to 12~30 V_o-p, a silicon wafer with ultra low-resistivity (0.001 Omega-cm) was firstly adopted as the substrate of SDA micromotor. Furthermore, a novel "ribbed ring and the filleted beam" structure design for the improvement of lifetime (>72 hrs) of SDA micromotor was also demonstrated in this research. Many different geometric designs of the SDA-plate, including the rectangle and triangle SDA-plates with or without etching holes, are investigated for characteristics optimization of SDA micromotor. A MUMPs-like polysilicon- based surface micromachining technology is developed for the implementation of the SDA micromotor.