Ferromagnetic MEMS

UCLA
ABSTRACT:
Magnetism has long been the driving force for efficient macroscopic actuators and the property sensed in robust macroscopic sensors. Together these actuators and sensors have been integrated into many commercially successful macroscopic systems that many of our lives have come to depend on. The introduction of highly scalable planar fabrication process have sparked an extraordinarily increasing ability to produce smaller, cheaper, and better solid-state electronic and magnetic devices (e.g., ICs and magnetic recording heads). In the last decade there has been an explosion of effort directed at producing released microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) with the same fabrication techniques used to produce ICs and magnetic recording heads. Many microactuators and microsensors that employ any of a variety of transduction mechanisms (e.g., mechanical, electrostatic, magnetic, thermal, optical, fluidic, chemical, biological), have been designed, fabricated, and tested to address a diverse set of applications. The determination of which transduction mechanism, material, fabrication technology, design, and model to use is a series of complex multidisciplinary decisions that are difficult to generalize. Scaling properties are a key consideration since they sometimes yield results that are non-intuitive or require new models and constitutive equations. After discussing the scaling characteristics of magnetic devices and comparing them to electrostatic devices, this talk will describe various ferromagnetic MEMS that have been produced. Potential applications of ferromagnetic MEMS will also be discussed. Lastly, additional ferromagnetic MEMS design and fabrication issues will be described that represent avenues for future research.

BIO:
Dr. Judy received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, CA, in 1996 and 1994 respectively, as well as the B.S.E.E. degree, with summa cum laude honors, from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, in 1989. He has been on the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, since 1997, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. He has also worked for Silicon Light Machines, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, an optical-MEMS startup company, from 1996 to 1997. In his doctoral research he developed a novel ferromagnetic microactuator technology that is useful for a variety of applications, including optical MEMS and RF MEMS. At UCLA he is also the co-director of the UCLA NeuroEngineering program, which is a NSF-funded IGERT program. His present research interests include additional novel ferromagnetic MEMS, electronic noses, and neuroengineering projects, such as microprobes for Parkinson's disease research, electrode arrays for retinal prosthetics, wireless neural transceivers, microfabricated patch-clamp arrays, and neural control systems for spinal cord injury, ocular motility, and deep brain stimulation.