Design and fabrication of microactuators for high density data storage

Author

Fan, Long-Sheng

Author_Institution

IBM Almaden Res. Center, San Jose, CA, USA

Volume

32

Issue

3

fYear

1996

fDate

5/1/1996 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1855

Lastpage

1862

Abstract

The design and fabrication of mm-sized MEMS actuator structures is described. A one-mm-sized microfabricated actuator is capable of linearized output of 0.2 mN when driven at 60 Volts by using an area-efficient electrostatic design, a high-aspect ratio microfabrication process, and a large signal linearization scheme. This increased output force enables the batch-fabricated microactuators to be used in practical applications in which the microactuators are required to move an external load. This paper concentrates on the design and process issues of the microactuators used as the fine actuator in a two-stage servo system for the high bandwidth positioning of a magnetic recording head slider. Other devices made by the same process technology are fully-integrated wobble micromotors and wobble actuators with potential applications in chip-sized disk drives using tip-based high density data storage

Keywords

electrostatic devices; magnetic heads; microactuators; 1 mm; 60 V; MEMS actuators; area efficiency; batch fabrication; design; disk drives; electrostatic microactuators; high bandwidth positioning; high density data storage; magnetic recording head slider; microfabrication; signal linearization; two-stage servo system; wobble actuators; wobble micromotors; Bandwidth; Electrostatic actuators; Fabrication; Hydraulic actuators; Microactuators; Micromechanical devices; Process design; Servomechanisms; Signal design; Signal processing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9464

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/20.492877

Filename

492877