Complete system for wireless powering and remote control of electrostatic actuators by inductive coupling

This paper proposes a successful asynchronous remote powering and control of electrostatic microactuators, organized in two distributed micro motion systems (DMMS) with the aim of realizing a wireless microrobot. Remote powering of the integrated circuit (IC) and the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) components is obtained by inductive coupling at 13.56 MHz, and the digital transmission is created by modulating the carrier amplitude by 25%. The system includes a high-voltage controller IC. It provides a link between the power and data on the receiver antenna on one side, and the actuators of the microrobot on the other. The micromachined antenna is designed to optimize the inductive coupling. The main IC building blocks, such as the received signal rectifier/amplifier, the integrated digital processing and the DMMS actuation voltage generation are given in detail. The demonstrator has successfully achieved the remote control and asynchronous operation under 100 V of two arrays of 1700 electrostatic actuators, having a capacity of 2 nF each.