Additive Manufacturing of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS)

Abstract

Recently, additive manufacturing (AM) processes applied to the micrometer range are subjected to intense development motivated by the influence of the consolidated methods for the macroscale and by the attraction for digital design and freeform fabrication. The integration of AM with the other steps of conventional micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) fabrication processes is still in progress and, furthermore, the development of dedicated design methods for this field is under development. The large variety of AM processes and materials is leading to an abundance of documentation about process attempts, setup details, and case studies. However, the fast and multi-technological development of AM methods for microstructures will require organized analysis of the specific and comparative advantages, constraints, and limitations of the processes. The goal of this paper is to provide an up-to-date overall view on the AM processes at the microscale and also to organize and disambiguate the related performances, capabilities, and resolutions.

Additive manufacturing of Zn with submicron resolution and its conversion into Zn/ZnO core–shell structures

“…Overcoming these constraints of classical microfabrication has applications in manufacturing intricate structures, for example in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) 4 , photonics 5 or microrobotics 6 . Thus, significant effort is currently made to develop AM techniques with resolutions in the submicron range [7][8][9][10][11] .…”

“…6 Thus, significant effort is currently made to develop AM techniques with resolutions in the submicron range. 7–11…”

“…6 Thus, significant effort is currently made to develop AM techniques with resolutions in the submicron range. [7][8][9][10][11] A key challenge of small-scale AM is the direct incorporation electronic materials typically used in microfabrication (Fig. 1a), i.e.…”

Additive Manufacturing of Multi‐Metal Microstructures by Localized Electrochemical Deposition Under Hydrodynamic Confinement

“…[5] The most common approaches to metal AM utilize a high-intensity laser or electron beam for the melting and sintering of powderbased precursors. [5] Miniaturization of metal AM processes is of particular interest in micro electromechanical systems (MEMS), [6][7][8] electronics, [9][10][11] and energy storage [12] to enable configurations that cannot be implemented using the standard mask and template methods of the micro and nanoscale. [13,14] However, in contrast to existing polymer AM methods, [15,16] where the chemical and physical principles of stereo-lithography and two-photon polymerization can be adapted for micro and nanoscale resolu tions, there is a fundamental limitation in the miniaturization of existing metal AM techniques.…”

In-situ measurement of anisotropic Young’s modulus in fused deposition modeling printed cantilevers

“…Over the past decade, three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques have become highly accessible, thanks to its decreasing device and material cost [1]. Among a variety of 3D-printing techniques selective laser sintering (SLS) [2], stereolithography (SLA) [3], inkjet [4] and fused deposition modeling (FDM) [5] are four popular 3D-printing techniques offering a minimum feature size that is typically on the order of 100 µm [6][7][8], at a moderate to high manufacturing speeds (∼12 mm 3 s −1 ). Three-dimensional printing's inherent advantages levitated its use to microsystems, in pressure sensing [9][10][11][12], pneumatic actuator based soft robotic structures [13,14], 2D and 3D laser scanning [15][16][17], laser imaging detection and ranging (LIDAR) applications [18,19], visible light communication [20], and microfluidic applications [21,22].…”