Analysis and Simulation of Serpentine Suspensions for MEMS Applications

In many MEMS devices, the mechanical suspension method usually creates a problem of how it should be suspended versus the design area and structure complexity. Simple designs may be able to keep complexity level down, however they do not usually hit the targeted specifications. Serpentine suspension proves to be very useful in such cases. In this paper, three serpentine suspensions are discussed and analyzed. Mathematical expressions of each serpentine are derived in terms of stiffness. The derived expressions validity was tested with COMSOL simulation, and results show very good agreement between analytical expression and simulation. 