Sneeze, and you'll blow this baby across the clean room. This magnetic linear microactuator, a member of a family of devices designed to provide precise motion at very fine (read submicron) scales, is about the size of a Tic Tac. Made of a nickel-iron alloy by the wizards at the Wisconsin Center for Applied Microelectronics, this device, using the attachments with holes that extend from two sides, can be used for a variety of tasks from surgery to the switching of optical fibers to the positioning of read-write heads of disk drives. Micromechanical devices are assuming an increasing importance in many industries. This device was machined to submicron tolerances with X-rays and an electrodeposition process. For a sense of scale, a human hair is about 75 microns in diameter.
Image courtesy of and copyrighted by Henry Guckel and the Wisconsin Center for Applied Microelectronics.
