Rapid Prototyping of Plastic Micro Devices by Excimerlaser Ablation

Abstract

ABSTRACTNowadays the application of micro devices in many fields like e.g. in the life sciences, chemistry and also optics strongly grows in importance. Micro structures often allow efficient processes with low resource consumption and the possibility of high integration. Typical examples are micro and nano titer plates for chemical screening or DNA chips for sequencing, micro mixers and reaction systems for synthesis on demand or micro optical elements like couplers for optical data transmission. Especially plastics are well suited for the cost effective large number fabrication, using high precision mould inserts with injection moulding or hot embossing. Since the micro devices become more and more complex (keywords: lab on a chip and micro total analysis systems, μ-TAS) the fabrication of mould inserts will be more expensive and time consuming. This is the reason why often methods of rapid prototyping are required for design qualification and functionality test purposes during the development. It will be demonstrated that Excimerlaser ablation is a well suited method for rapid prototyping of quasi-three-dimensional micro structures. Almost all polymers can be ablated by the UV laser radiation with very high accuracy, using mask projection techniques. Therefore, the choice of a suited polymer with adapted material properties like for e.g. chemical resistance, optical surface quality or bio-compatibility allows one to account for the requirements of the corresponding application. Moreover, the prototypes can easily be transformed into mould inserts for large number fabrication, using the Laser-LIGA technique. The corresponding technologies will be explained and demonstrated with the aid of several examples, especially taking into account the material aspects.