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This paper presents a new actuation mechanism to drive comb-drive actuators. An asymmetric configuration of the finger overlap was used to generate capacitive coupling for the actuation mechanism. When the driving voltages were applied on the stators, a voltage would be induced at the rotor due to the capacitive coupling. Then, an electrostatic force would be exerted onto the rotor due to the voltage differences between the stators and the rotor. The actuator’s static displacement and resonant frequency were theoretically analyzed. To verify the design, a comb-drive actuator with different initial finger overlaps, i.e., 159.3 μm and 48.9 μm on each side, was fabricated and tested. The results show that the actuator worked well using the proposed actuation mechanism. A static displacement of 41.7 μm and a resonant frequency of 577 Hz were achieved. Using the actuation mechanism, no electrical connection is required between the rotor and the outside power supply. This makes some comb-drive actuators containing heterogeneous structures easy to design and actuate.

In this study, we mechanically strengthened a borosilicate glass wafer by doubling its bending strength and simultaneously enhancing its transparency using surface nanostructures for different applications including sensors, displays and panels. A fabrication method that combines dry and wet etching is used for surface nanostructure fabrication. Specifically, we improved the bending strength of plain borosilicate glass by 96% using these surface nanostructures on both sides. Besides bending strength improvement, a limited optical transmittance enhancement of 3% was also observed in the visible light wavelength region (400–800 nm). Both strength and transparency were improved by using surface nanostructures of 500 nm depth on both sides of the borosilicate glass without affecting its bulk properties or the glass manufacturing process. Moreover, we observed comparatively smaller fragments during the breaking of the nanostructured glass, which is indicative of strengthening. The range for the nanostructure depth is defined for different applications with which improvements of the strength and transparency of borosilicate glass substrate are obtained.