Fabrication of low-stress low-stiffness leveraged cantilever beam for bistable mechanism

This paper presents the fabrication and application of a leveraged cantilever beam with low-stress and low-stiffness. This cantilever beam is overhanged with two free ends and suspended in air by the supporting torsion flexures fixed at its middle. The teeterboard-typed cantilever features a low-stiffness with 1.63 N/m, and a low-stress with ±6.27 MPa. The cantilever beam was prepared by a laminated photoresist sacrificial layer process (LPSLP), that is, a multilayered photoresist film for supporting the suspended cantilever beams. In this work, two main problems related to microfabrication process were discussed. One is the control of residual stress in permalloy cantilever with varying the contents of additive saccharin to minimize the deformation of the free end of the beams. The other is an improved wet release method to avoid the adhesion or stiction of the all metal microstructures. The proposed leveraged cantilever beam has a potential application on the bistable switching mechanism in single-pole-double-through (SPDT) latching relay fields. Switching between two stable states of the microbeam mechanism was successfully validated with WYKO NT1100 optical profiling system.