Tetramorph, a novel optical scanner using four piezoelectric bimorphs

Piezoelectric bimorphs are inexpensive and can be applied to a wide variety of purposes. We took two bimorphs to move one end of a mirror upward (down ward), and two more piezoelectric bimorphs to move the other end downward ( upward). The new aspect of this approach is that the angle of the mirror is much larger than that driven by the bending of each bimorph alone due to m echanical amplification. The optical scanner has a static and nonresonance mirror rotation of up to 4.6 deg. The power consumption at resonance with m aximum driving voltage was calculated at 2.6 mW, which we consider to be lo w power consumption. (C) 2000 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engi neers. [S0091-3286(00)01810-9].