Fabrication of metalic and silicon microactuators with high-aspect-ratio driving gaps

This paper deals with microactuators for the precise positioning of read/write heads in very-high-density magnetic hard disk drives. In order to satisfy required specifications, namely the displacement of /spl plusmn/0.5/spl mu/m at or below 20V and the structural resonance frequency of 15kHz the electrostatic gap, the mover and the stator must be very small (/spl sim/2/spl mu/m) and its aspect ratio must be high (/spl sim/50). We developed the vertical sacrificial layer process to realize such high-aspect-ratio gaps.