Abstract

Background: Electrothermal microactuators are very promising for wide range of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) applications due to the low voltage requirement and large force produced.

Method: A new optimized V-beam electrothermal micro actuator was implemented in variable optical attenuator. In this work, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique is proposed to design the Vshaped beam.

Result: The approach has successfully improved both angular displacement & output force of the microactuator. Entropy generation rate was used as optimization criteria.

Keywords: PSO, entropy, variable optical attenuator, microactuators, RF MEMS, genetic algorithms.