Design and fabrication of 2-DOF micromirror array based on electro-thermal actuators

With surface- and bulk-micromachining, an 8 × 8 mirrors array is designed, fabricated and tested, which is based on electro-thermal actuators and can be addressed individually. The micromirror is squareshaped, 4-corner-actuated. Its dimension is 200 μm × 200 μm. The substrate below it is caved away to ensure a tilt at an angle as large as possible. To protect the etch-sensitive features on the front side of the wafer undamaged during wet deep silicon etch on the backside, the wax protective coating process is used. Mirror actuated by powering an alternative pair of heaters will tilt in 2-DOF. If its 4 cantilevers/heaters are powered synchronously, it will move in a piston mode. The effective arrays are more than 80% out of the three finished wafers. When the ramp voltage frequency applied to a pair of neighboring cantilevers is 5 Hz at 10 V, the average tilting angle can be ± 8°.