Design, fabrication, and testing of silicon microgimbals for super-compact rigid disk drives

This paper documents results related to design optimization, fabrication process refinement, and micron-level static/dynamic testing of silicon micromachined microgimbals that have applications in super-compact computer disk drives as well as many other engineering applications of microstructures and microactuators requiring significant out-of-plane motions. The objective of the optimization effort is to increase the in-plane to out-of-plane stiffness ratio in order to maximize compliance and servo bandwidth and to increase the displacement to strain ratio to maximize the shock resistance of the microgimbals, while that of the process modification effort is to simplify in order to reduce manufacturing cost. The testing effort is to characterize both the static and dynamic performance using precision instrumentation in order to compare various prototype designs

Silicon micromachined electromagnetic microactuators for rigid disk drives

It is projected that by the year 2001, the disk drive industry will be shipping products with track density on the order of 25,000 tracks-per-inch, which would require a servo bandwidth of at least 3 kHz. This paper presents initial fabrication results of an industry and government supported research project at Caltech and UCLA to develop piggyback electromagnetically driven microactuators for such applications, which are fabricated using the state-of-the-art silicon micromachining techniques

Silicon micromachined electromagnetic microactuators for rigid disk drives

It is projected that by the year 2001, the disk drive industry will be shipping products with track density on the order of 25,000 tracks-per-inch, which would require a servo bandwidth of at least 3 kHz. This paper presents initial fabrication results of an industry and government supported research project at Caltech and UCLA to develop piggyback electromagnetically driven microactuators for such applications, which are fabricated using the state-of-the-art silicon micromachining techniques