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%675$&7During the last decade rapid prototyping has made a tremendous success in almost every branch of industrial fabrication. Almost every article of today's life is pre-fabricated in a rapid process during its design. Functional rapid prototypes represent an increasing share, as they allow realistic functional tests of a component in an early stage of development.MEMS technology is still at the beginning of the rapid prototyping aera. Up to now, only a few conventional techniques, like stereolithography, have been downscaled to create rapid microprototypes with a limited choice of materials and geometries. Rapid prototyping of silicon is completely out of reach today.In this paper we propose a micro rapid prototyping concept for functional silicon microstructures. The process combines laser technology with standard processes of silicon microstructuring and has been evaluated with a metal-silicon layer system. First, noble metal is vapour deposited on top of a silicon wafer. The metal is subsequently structured with a laser, thus creating a mask, which can be transferred into the silicon by standard chemical etching procedures like KOH-etch. The advantage of this concept is that the time-consuming photomask generation is omitted completely, as the laser can be guided with CAD data. Moreover, the standard structuring process gives the opportunity to gain a microstructure with features equivalent to the final component.