Design Of A Novel Electrothermal Actuator for Integrated MEMS Safety-and-Arming Devices

The design, fabrication and characterization of a novel electrothermal actuator for MEMS safety-and-arming devices are presented in this paper. The device is comprised of two V-shape electrothermal actuators, a V-beam amplification and a mechanical slider. The two V-shape electrothermal actuators generate the original displacement and the V-beam amplification is used to amplify this displacement for arming. The characteristics of the V-shape actuator and V-beam amplification are analyzed and validated by finite element method. The whole device is fabricated on SOI wafer, and MUMPs process is introduced. The experiment results demonstrate that the displacement of the device is 120.89 mu m with consuming power of 3.12 W and response time of 16 ms under an applied voltage of 16 V. The chip size is about 4mm*5mm*0.5mm, which can be easily integrated with other micro devices.