Publication

Microstereolithography

Abstract

Microstereolithography is a 3D microfabrication technology that is fundamentally different from the techniques commonly used in cleanroom environment for the manufacturing of microelectromechanical system (MEMS) components. Most microfabrication techniques evolved from the microelectronics industry and often use silicon wafers as substrate or carrier material, thin films of metals deposited by evaporation or sputtering, thin layers of polymers deposited by spin coating and patterned by photolithography, and chemical and plasma etching to generate various shapes. Microstereolithography is also a microfabrication technique, but it is related to rapid prototyping technologies, and more precisely to stereolithography, a technique patented in 1986, allowing the fabrication of 3D components by layer-by-layer curing of a photopolymerizable resin with an ultraviolet (UV) laser. Microstereolithography is based on a manufacturing principle very similar to the one of stereolithography, but implements process improvements that result in a far better resolution.

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Related concepts (32)
Etching (microfabrication)
Etching is used in microfabrication to chemically remove layers from the surface of a wafer during manufacturing. Etching is a critically important process module, and every wafer undergoes many etching steps before it is complete. For many etch steps, part of the wafer is protected from the etchant by a "masking" material which resists etching. In some cases, the masking material is a photoresist which has been patterned using photolithography. Other situations require a more durable mask, such as silicon nitride.
Microfabrication
Microfabrication is the process of fabricating miniature structures of micrometre scales and smaller. Historically, the earliest microfabrication processes were used for integrated circuit fabrication, also known as "semiconductor manufacturing" or "semiconductor device fabrication". In the last two decades microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), microsystems (European usage), micromachines (Japanese terminology) and their subfields, microfluidics/lab-on-a-chip, optical MEMS (also called MOEMS), RF MEMS, PowerMEMS, BioMEMS and their extension into nanoscale (for example NEMS, for nano electro mechanical systems) have re-used, adapted or extended microfabrication methods.
Plasma etching
Plasma etching is a form of plasma processing used to fabricate integrated circuits. It involves a high-speed stream of glow discharge (plasma) of an appropriate gas mixture being shot (in pulses) at a sample. The plasma source, known as etch species, can be either charged (ions) or neutral (atoms and radicals). During the process, the plasma generates volatile etch products at room temperature from the chemical reactions between the elements of the material etched and the reactive species generated by the plasma.
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