Glossary: Offset liquid embossing

Offset liquid embossing OLE was designed to address some of the limitations of liquid embossing. In OLE the patterned liquid film is transferred to a different substrate, allowing finer control over geometry and material placement and leaving behind excess material trapped during stamping. All-printed electrostatic actuators were fabricated at MIT Media Laboratory in this way, by patterning gold on flexible polyimide and then under-etching with oxygen plasma. The polyimide acted as a sacrificial material, dielectric layer, and mechanical substrate. Square electrostatic actuators 50 microns on a side could modulate light up to approximately 1 kHz with fields of 1-2 volts per micron. These actuators also showed a sharp non-linear response to driving voltage that could be used as part of a passive row/column addressing scheme.