Development of an electrochemical micromachining instrument for the confined etching techniques

Rev Sci Instrum. 2014 Apr;85(4):045122. doi: 10.1063/1.4872382.

Abstract

This study proposes an electrochemical micromachining instrument for two confined etching techniques, namely, confined etchant layer technique (CELT) and electrochemical wet stamping (E-WETS). The proposed instrument consists of a granite bridge base, a Z-axis coarse/fine dual stage, and a force sensor. The Z-axis coarse/fine dual stage controls the vertical movement of the substrate with nanometer accuracy. The force sensor measures the contact force between the mold and the substrate. A contact detection method based on a digital lock-in amplifier is developed to make the mold-substrate contact within a five-nanometer range in CELT, and a force feedback controller is implemented to keep the contact force in E-WETS at a constant value with a noise of less than 0.2 mN. With the use of the confined etching techniques, a microlens array and a curvilinear ridge microstructure are successfully fabricated with high accuracy, thus demonstrating the promising performance of the proposed micromachining instrument.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Electrochemical Techniques* / instrumentation
  • Electrochemical Techniques* / methods