Design of VCM actuator with L-shape coil for smartphone cameras

Recently, smartphones play a very important role in our daily life and have almost replaced commercial digital cameras. The performance requirements of smartphone cameras are getting higher for consumers. Accordingly, we have presented a novel voice coil motor (VCM) actuator with the optical image stabilization (OIS) function for smartphone cameras in this study. We have characterized numerically the proposed OIS VCM actuator by means of commercial software MagNet simulations and then verified experimentally its performance by using a laboratory-built prototype. The results show that the proposed OIS VCM actuator is not only thinner than a commercial OIS VCM actuator, but also has lower power consumption, lower cost, and a rapid response.