Laser-LIGA: A Cost Saving Process for Flexible Production of Microstructures

摘要

Ablation by exeimer laser radiation can successfully be used for microstructuring. However, the costs of production are still rather high due to the fact that laser processing is, in general, a serial process. Cost reduction is possible by combining exci¬mer laser micromachining with a replication process. We call this process "Laser-LIGA", which is a variant of the LIGA technique using ablation of polymers and photoresists by UV excimer lasers as the first structure-defining process step. Com-pared to deep X-ray lithe graphy the surface quality of microstructures made by laser ablation is slightly poorer and the maximum aspect ratios (up to 10) are considerably lower too. On the other hand Laser-LIGA offers more flexibility. Almost any geometry can be realised, in many cases without a mask by direct structuration. This process is therefore suited to rapid prototyping as well as for large scale production of micro-scale devices. In this paper some applications of Laser-LIGA for different fields of microstructuring will be demonstrated including components of microfluidic systems, microoptical devices and devices for medical applications. Such systems open up the potential for completely new developments at the micro scale.