Experimental Characterization of the Electrostatic Levitation Force in MEMS Transducers

Abstract

In this study, a two-step experimental procedure is described to determine the electrostatic levitation force in micro-electromechanical system transducers. In these two steps, the microstructure is excited quasi-statically and dynamically and its response is used to derive the electrostatic force. The experimental results are obtained for a 1 mm by 1 mm plate that employs 112 levitation units. The experimentally obtained force is used in a lumped parameter model to find the microstructure response when it is subjected to different dynamical loads. The natural frequency and the damping ratios in the model are identified from the experimental results. The results show that this procedure can be used as a method to extract the electrostatic force as a function of the microstructure’s degrees-of-freedom. The procedure can be easily used for any microstructure with a wide variety of electrode configurations to predict the response of the system to any input excitation.