There is currently tremendous interest in micromachining and the development of MicroElectroMechanical systems (MEMS). However there have been several major problems:
Microscopic structures with arbitrary 3-D geometry have been impossible to fabricate. Figs. 1-2 illustrate the geometries available with current state-of-the-art processes.
EFAB is able to quickly and economically deposit hundreds or even
thousands of layers, making possible much more sophisticated and
functional devices such as new tools for medicine (e.g., micro-sized
instruments for minimally-invasive surgery).
It has taken too long to fabricate micro-devices with previous methods. For example, the 3-layer surface micromachining service offered by Cronos has a delivery of 8-12 weeks. Typical MEMS devices take 5-10 years to reach their customers. EFAB can produce hundreds of layers in the time such methods deliver just a few. This puts devices in designers hands while the design is still fresh in their heads, and helps speed new products to market. As a versatile process (see below), EFAB reduces the need to develop custom manufacturing processes from scratch for each new design.
Too much expertise (e.g., Ph.D-level mastery of exotic semiconductor fabrication processes) and a great deal of manual labor has been required to produce a micromachine device with previous micromachining techniques.
EFAB is easy to understand and has simple design rules. It is driven directly from a 3-D CAD (Computer-Aided Design) model created on a PC that represents the device one wishes to build, offering true WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) engineering of micro-devices.
EFAB should thus give many more engineers the ability to incorporate MEMS and micro-parts in their designs.
There has been no versatile, general-purpose, standardized micromachining process (in the same way that engineers use milling and casting to make macroscopic parts), so almost every new micro-device has needed the development of a custom process. Also, there have been too many variables in microfabrication processes.
EFAB is capable of virtually unlimited geometry (actually allowing geometries more complex than milling and casting) and allows for monolithic integration with ICs through post-processing, in a consistent way that requires no changes to standard IC fabrication.
It has been difficult to integrate micromechanics with microelectronics, allowing sophisticated integrated "systems on a chip". The benefits of such integration is clearly demonstrated by such devices as Texas Instruments' Digital Micromirror Device, but it was not easy to achieve (costing many hundreds of millions of dollars), and the TI process is not a general purpose solution to combining micromechanics with microelectronics.
EFAB is intrinsically compatible with integrated circuits, primarily due to its low processing temperature (cooler than a cup of coffee). In the future, EFAB will allow arbitrary microstructures to be deposited over, and electrically and mechanically interfaced, to standard integrated circuit, enabling smaller devices, reducing assembly cost, minimizing parasitic capacitance and inductance, and making possible very dense packing of devices (e.g., mirror arrays).
Rather than trying to force semiconductor fabrication technology to do something it really can't (3-D structures), EFAB uses it for what it does best (microelectronics), while offering a compatible process developed from the ground up to fabricate highly complex 3-D micromechanisms.