Electronically integrated, mass-manufactured, microscopic robots

• Published in: Nature (London) 2020-08, Vol.584 (7822), p.557-561
• Main Authors: Miskin, Marc Z., Cortese, Alejandro J., Dorsey, Kyle, Esposito, Edward P., Reynolds, Michael F., Liu, Qingkun, Cao, Michael, Muller, David A., McEuen, Paul L., Cohen, Itai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 142/126; 639/166/987; 639/166/988; 639/925/357/1018; 639/925/927/359; Actuators; Adsorption; Control; Electrochemistry; Electrolytes; Electronic control; Fabrication; Humanities and Social Sciences; Installation; Integrators; Mass production; Methods; Microelectromechanical systems; Micromechanics; Mobile robots; Moore's law; multidisciplinary; Production management; Production processes; Robotics industry; Robots; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Signal processing; Silicon; Stability; Walking
• ISSN: 0028-0836; 1476-4687
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2626-9

Fifty years of Moore’s law scaling in microelectronics have brought remarkable opportunities for the rapidly evolving field of microscopic robotics 1 – 5 . Electronic, magnetic and optical systems now offer an unprecedented combination of complexity, small size and low cost 6 , 7 , and could be readily appropriated for robots that are smaller than the resolution limit of human vision (less than a hundred micrometres) 8 – 11 . However, a major roadblock exists: there is no micrometre-scale actuator system that seamlessly integrates with semiconductor processing and responds to standard electronic control signals. Here we overcome this barrier by developing a new class of voltage-controllable electrochemical actuators that operate at low voltages (200 microvolts), low power (10 nanowatts) and are completely compatible with silicon processing. To demonstrate their potential, we develop lithographic fabrication-and-release protocols to prototype sub-hundred-micrometre walking robots. Every step in this process is performed in parallel, allowing us to produce over one million robots per four-inch wafer. These results are an important advance towards mass-manufactured, silicon-based, functional robots that are too small to be resolved by the naked eye. A new class of voltage-controllable electrochemical actuators that are compatible with silicon processing are used to produce over one million sub-hundred-micrometre walking robots on a single four-inch wafer.