<title>Self-alignment for microparts assembly using water surface tension</title>

Abstract

Alignment of microparts is a very important task in the assembly of microsystems. In conventional alignment, servomechanisms are used. However, in general, the servomechanisms are not only too large to align microparts but also complex and expensive. For overcoming these problems, a self-alignment method using liquid surface tension is proposed in this paper. The surface of the used microparts is divided into two kinds of areas: the wettability of one area is higher than that of the other. Using the microparts, the self-alignment is realized as follows: (1) a droplet of liquid is put on high wettability surface area of the first part, (2) the second part is put on the first one, (3) the second part is moved by the surface tension of the liquid so that the wettability area pattern of the first part overlaps with that of the second one and the alignment is accomplished. In this paper, the self-alignment characteristics using water as the liquid is examined experimentally. The experiment results prove the average of the final alignment errors becomes less than 10micrometers even if an initial alignment error is 100micrometers .© (1999) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.