Low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) tapes (DuPont, 951 series), originally developed for monolithic packaging of interconnects and hybrid microelectronic circuitry, have been used in the past five years to develop a meso-scale integrated fluidic technology. The LTCC fluidic technology is shown to be versatile, inexpensive, fast, and free of packaging problems. The manufacturing basis for this technology is the patterning of individual tapes, which are laminated and co-fired to create a layered three-dimensional (3D) structure. In this paper, we present another attractive facet of this technology by creating 3D shell structures with a single layer of LTCC tape. The processing technique is illustrated with actuated hemispherical and cylindrical shells that have internal 3D conduits. In order to demonstrate the application of an active device using magnetostatically actuated curved LTCC shells we also present a novel three degrees-of-freedom spherical stepper motor. [References: 19]
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