On Monday, June 12th, a seminar entitled “Silicon based micromechanical actuators” will take place in Beltrami Room (Building 5 – Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32). The seminar will be given by Harald Schenk, Professor at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems – Brandenburg Technical University (Germany).

It will be possible to follow the seminar from the following  link.

Abstract

Fraunhofer IPMS is a leading research and development institute in the field of micromechanical sensors, & actuators, and systems based on them. The most important fields of application are smart industrial solutions, mobility, and medical & health. The presentation starts with a brief introduction of the institute and then turns to the field of micromechanical actuators. Three different classes of electrostatic microactuators based on silicon are currently investigated and developed at IPMS. The first class are comb actuators, which are used for driving of scanning mirrors for 1D and 2D light deflection. Typical application examples are LIDAR systems for autonomous vehicles. The second class are highly integrable actuators used for micromirror arrays with a million addressable single mirrors per chip. These arrays are deployed, among other applications, in microlithography as programmable mask. In a current research project, they are also being further developed for use in holographic displays. The third class of electrostatic actuators presented in the talk are novel bending actuators that achieve high deflections at small electrical voltages. They form the basis for micropositioning systems with a displacement of several hundred micrometers but also of novel micro loudspeakers and ultrasonic transducers.