Ultra-®ne particles of metal and ceramic materials jetting with the velocities of several hundreds m/s is accumulated on the substrate based on impact adhesion. Recently, the application of this phenomenon for micro electro mechanical systems and micro devise has been investigated. In this paper, the deposition method based on ultra-®ne particle beam and possibilities of its application as HARMST are reported.
IntroductionThick ®lm deposition and pattering, the thickness range of 1 to 100 lm, is the subject of a great interest in miniature actuator [1], micro transformer, and thin-®lm inductor [2] applications. Conventional deposition processes such as sputtering, sol-gel method, laser-ablation method and electroplating have some disadvantages such as, low deposition rates and the restrictions on material selection. It is also dif®cult to form such ®lms by conventional bonding and polishing of the bulk materials. For the ®ne pattering, two approaches have been proposed to fabrication of these micro devices. One is the lithographic approach and the other is the sophistication of conventional mechanical fabrication processes. The lithographic approach has the advantageous capability of de®nition of ®ne patterns with little necessity of assembling, however fabrication of more than 10 lm thick structure and introduction of exotic materials such as piezoelectric materials and magnetic materials are extremely dif®cult. The sophisticated conventional mechanical approach has also problems dealing with limitations of machining size and dif®culties of assembling.On the other hand, several deposition methods based on the principle of particle impaction have already been introduced and investigated. They include depositing ultra®ne particles via electrical ®eld acceleration (Electrostatic Particle-Impact Deposition (EPID) [3]), and via acceleration by mixing with high speed gas¯ow (Gas Deposition Method (GDM) [4] or Hypersonic Plasma Particle Deposition (HPPD) [5]). The expected features of these methods are high speed deposition rate and ®lm formation at low temperature. However, no reports have been published on these methodsÕ application to the fabrication of three dimensional micro structures. This is the reason why we study a new molding technology based on impact adhesion of ultra-®ne particles.GDM is the simplest method of energy supplement for the deposition among these methods described above. Recently, we have investigated the deposition mechanism of GDM and modi®ed it for three dimensional microstructuring, Jet molding, and demonstrated some examples of the superiority of Jet-molding for metal and functional ceramic materials [6±8]. In this method ultra ®ne particles of materials are ejected by a jet stream of carrier gas onto the substrate surface through the laser fabricated micro masks.The purpose of this paper is to present and introduce the advantages of this methods, such as;(1) High speed deposition and low process temperature resulting from solid to solid reaction feature of this process (2) Pattering capa...