Abstract: In order to bring about industrialization in mi-cro-electro-mechanical systems(MEMS), the microgripper applied in microoperation and microassembly is developed. It is based on electrothermal principle. V-shaped beam array elec-trothermal microactuators is adoped to generate displacement for microgriper,and the microgripper is designed by topology optimization. Niclel is selected for fabricating the electrother-mal microgripper,and UV-LIGA process is used to fabricate the electrothermal microgripper. The optimized parameters for SU-8 mold are obtained through orthogonal experiment. All factors influenced process are discussed in detail and the re-solved methods are given. And an electrothermal nickel micro-griper with whole dimension in a millimeter magnitude, depth 30 μm and minimum character size 10 μm. Final dynamic per-formance of the nickel microgripper is experimented within 0~2.5 V range. The maximum tweezing displacements of up to 67 μm is recorded for this nickel microgripper, and the maximum clamping force can reach 0.8 N. This microgeipper can satisfy microoperation in MEMS.

Key words: Electroplating, Microgripper, UV-LIGA