GALVANOPLATING AND SACRIFICIAL LAYERS FOR SURFACE MICROMACHINING

For advanced surface micromachining 3D UV-Microforming delivers excell ent results. This low-cost technology, a combination of UV patterning of very thick photoresist layers and and moulding of the resulting pat terns by galvanoplating, opens a wide range of applications. If combin ed with sacrificial layer technology, this new technique offers a wide variety of smart processing methods. Especially the generation of sac rificial layers by electrodeposition itself enables the construction o f micro components with high precision from the mum to the mm range. 3 D UV-Microforming allows the use of materials with interesting propert ies which could not be provided by standard processes. Furthermore, th is method can be carried out directly on pre-processed chips. The prac tical application of the technology is demonstrated on micro channels, micro coils and micro switches.