High aspect ratio structures obtained by electroforming in microstructured glass

Abstract

The application of glass in the microsystems technology becomes more and more important. Therefore, it is necessary to combine special microstructurable glasses with various other materials (e.g. joining with silicon by anodic bonding, joining with metals by electroforming, joining with polymers by glueing, joining with various other glasses by brazing or diffusion welding).In order to increase the use of glass in the microsystems technology especially four fields of research are important:-development of special glasses with various properties -technologies of microstructuring -technologies of joining -application These four topics are main research fields performed at the Institute of Glass/Ceramics-Technology and will be described in this paper.

Liquid Glass: A Facile Soft Replication Method for Structuring Glass

“…Glasses are primarily structured by masking the substrate with a polymer layer created via lithography and subsequent wet chemical etching using hazardous hydrofluoric acid (HF) . A more direct approach is accessible using photostructurable glasses like Foturan glass by Schott which can be structured by light and etched at lower HF concentrations . Although these techniques are well explored, these classical fabrication processes remain time‐consuming, hazardous (as they rely on HF), and expensive as they have to be carried out in cleanroom facilities .…”