NEW TECHNOLOGIES | ARTICLE
Imagine Your 3D Micro Device… and Print it
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How can you combine optical, fluidic, mechanical and electrical features in a single substrate at nano scale and fabricate integrated micro systems, sensors and photonics devices on your own in your laboratory?
No need for expensive infrastructures, like cleanrooms, or specific expertise: just design your micro device and print it in a transparent substrate thanks to the technology FEMTOPRINT.
Over the last decades we have experienced how micro/nano systems are becoming complex machines performing sophisticated tasks, integrating circuits, micro mechanical systems, photonics, fluidics and even organic material and bio-molecules.
MEMS are already common platforms for electronics and micro mechanics, but the use of the technology FEMTOPRINT is a breakthrough allowing to easily and rapidly produce integrated 3D micro devices out of glass, overcoming the packaging issues and the increasing complexity of fabrication processes.
Reducing the capital investments needed to setup, operate and maintain production facilities, with FEMTOPRINT a large number of users are able to design and produce their own micro devices, having a strong impact on innovation capabilities as well as on the ability to rapidly adapt to new demands.
The technology is based on the use of a low power femtosecond laser to pattern fused silica substrate. The material is selectively exposed by rasterising a 3D pattern. After laser exposure the material is etched in a low-concentration HF bath. If needed, the resulting channels can afterwards be filled with conductive paths.
Although enormous instantaneous powers are locally reached during the laser exposure, the average power typically does not exceed a few hundred of milliwatts (comparable to what a bright LED emits). Therefore tabletop femtosecond lasers not exceeding the volume of a shoe-box are sufficient to produce complex micro and nano systems like the following ones:
33 | commercial micro manufacturing international Vol 6 No.5
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