Piston Motion Performance Analysis of a 3DOF Electrothermal MEMS Scanner for Medical Applications

MEMS scanners are useful for medical applications as optical coherence tomography and laser microsurgery. Although widespread design of MEMS scanners have been presented, their behavior is not well known, and thus, their motions are not easily and efficiently controlled. This deficiency induces several difficulties (limited resolution, accuracy, cycle time, etc.), and to tackle this problem, this article presents the modeling of an ISC electrothermally actuated MEMS mirror and the experimental characterization for the piston motion. Modeling and characterization are important to implement the control. A multiphysic model is proposed, and an experimental validation is performed with a good correspondence for a voltage range from 0 V to 3.5 V with a maximum displacement up to 200 µm and with a relative tilting difference of 0.1°. The article also presents a simple and efficient experimental setup to measure a displacement in dynamic and static mode, or a mirror plane tilting in static mode.