Fabrication and assembly of micron-scale ceramic components

Abstract

The micron-scale manufacturing industry has grown to hundreds of billions of dollars since the advent of the transistor in 1947. Increasing demands for integration of surface mount components, greater use of portable electronic devices, and miniaturized medical diagnostic devices have given rise to the need for methods of fabricating and assembling micron-scale discrete components. Development of reliable non-contact assembly methods requires thorough understanding of electro-mechanics, surface adhesion, and gravitational forces acting on micron- scale objects. The impact of such a study will spread beyond microelectronics, and will also have broad significance in the development of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) for diverse applications such as biological assays, drug delivery devices, and tools for high throughput combinatorial materials development. This thesis will discuss methods for and challenges in fabrication, manipulation, and assembly of discrete micron-scale objects. The impact of these issues will be illustrated for the development of a micro-dispensing system used to manipulate microgram quantities of dry granular substances for combinatorial materials development. This method provides a model system to explore the forces on micron-scale objects, and is important in its own right as it will introduce a new range of materials that may benefit from combinatorial development. The applicability of traditional methods for computing dielectrophoretic forces on micron scale objects in the presence of spatially non-uniform electric fields will be discussed for the case of closely-spaced, interacting spheres.

(cont.) A dipole approximation model will be presented to quantitatively illustrate the limitations of existing techniques for calculating these forces, and to aid in explaining the observed motion of multiple interacting particles.