Guest editorial: IJAMT special issue on Multi-Material Micro Manufacture

Abstract

In today’s market, miniaturised and microsystems-based products represent key value-adding elements for many industrial sectors and thus, they are an important contributor to a sustainable economy [1]. Following the siliconbased microelectronics revolution of the late twentieth century, a number of micro and nano manufacturing techniques have been developed and implemented into process chains for the fabrication of micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS). Especially, this technology developments target particular niches in the market and as a consequence, a number of MEMS devices are now being effectively exploited commercially. Interest towards product miniaturisation and in general micro and nano technologies (MNTs) has even increased in recent years given that many companies are realising that MNT-based products provide a competitive advantage and represent innovative and high value-added solutions that will enable them to compete successfully on the global market. Thus, product designers increasingly try to develop new or improved devices that integrate a multitude of functions in order to broaden their application areas without significantly expanding their weight or volume. Such a trend for ‘function integration’ into new products has recently motivated the R&D community to investigate and propose novel micro manufacturing techniques and process chains, which do not rely only on photolithography-based technologies commonly employed for fabricating MEMS components. In particular, a range of advances in the field of micro and nano manufacturing have been reported, and further developments are necessary to support the production of novel microsystems-based products which require the use of a broad range of materials and incorporate complex three-dimensional structures with high aspect ratios. According to a recent study which analysed the distribution of European R&D efforts along a technology maturity scale in the field of MNTs, modest but promising R&D advances target the integration into production environments of the most important future micro manufacturing technologies [2]. At the same time, this study showed that significant R&D efforts are still required to address existing challenges at the different phases in developing micro manufacturing technologies. In this context, the focus of this special issue is on the latest scientific advances in manufacturing research to support the development of emerging and potentially disruptive miniaturised devices made in a wide range of materials complementing those commonly used in MEMS devices. The Issue is prepared from selected contributions to the Third Multi-Material Micro Manufacture Conference in Borovets, Bulgaria (4M2007) organised by the 4M Network of Excellence. The papers in this special issue can be clustered into three main groups. The first group includes papers that are focused on a set of micro manufacturing technologies, which are suitable for the production of micro-structured moulds. In particular, the Issue begins with two papers on micro electro discharge machining (EDM). The first one presents an investigation carried out by Bissacco et al. to characterise the electrode wear and workpiece material E. B. Brousseau : S. Dimov (*) :W. Menz The Manufacturing Engineering Centre, Cardiff University, Queen’s Buildings, The Parade Newport Road, Cardiff CF24 3AA, UK e-mail: dimov@Cardiff.ac.uk