A monolithic control circuit for a 1cm3 microrobot for biological experiments

A digital controller for a 1 cm3 microrobot fabricated in a 0.35m CMOS process is presented. The robot is provided with two piezoatuators based on stick-slip and nonsliding movement: a carrier platform and a rotor to position an arm provided with a nanomanipulation tool as an AFM tip. The control signals are generated by the controller chip using the Bresenham algorithm. It has been adapted to the robot movements improving the power consumption. Power reduction is of at least 30%.