Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

MEMS actuators and micromirrors are characterized as small size and low cost, and have be widely used in automotive, biomedical, communication, display, and consumer electronics industries. The proposed research will focus on the development of novel MEMS actuators and micromirrors and their applications. The long term goal is to gain deeper understanding and generate new knowledge of MEMS actuators and micromirrors and their applications, which will be achieved through pursuing three objectives. In objective 1, an innovative MEMS surface micromachined actuator will be developed which will double the force/torque of that of the current design. A novel fabrication technology of bonding an SOI (Silicon on Insulator) layer to surface micromachined chip will be developed, by which the surface micromachined micromirror can have a high quality surface with high flatness, no releasing holes and an-stiction dimples. Combining the novel micro actuator and the SOI + PolyMUMPS bonding fabrication technology, a micromirror and a micromirror based automotive Head-up Display (HUD) will be developed, which will have much superior performance than the existing designs, i.e., 5 ~ 10X smaller and cheaper, and can significantly enhance driving safety and comfort. The proposal’s objective 2 will investigate the FPCB (Flexible Printed Circuit Board) micromirror, which is a new field started by our group recently. The investigation will focus on the study of FPCB polyimide film’s viscoelastic property caused effects and control methods of alleviating or overcoming the effects. In addition, a 2D FPCB micromirror will be developed to construct laser pattern pointer to greatly enhance the presentation laser pointers’ performance. The objective 3 of the current proposal will develop a novel micromirror for endoscopic OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) imaging system, which is highly desired to achieve in vivo and noninvasive inspection and diagnosis of internal luminal organs, or operate real-time image guided surgery. The novel micromirror will have wireless driven vertical scanning DOF (Degree of Freedom) and the second DOF driven by a tubular piezoelectric motor for full circumferential rotation. Thus it can overcome the limitation of the current OCT endoscope, i.e., not enough circumferential scanning, which is the main hurdle for OCT endoscope’s wide clinic application.