Additive Micro-Manufacturing for Plastic Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems

PI: Prof. Dr. Juergen Brugger
Project start: 1^st October 2017
Project duration: 60 months

Summary

The manufacturing of silicon-based MEMS today is well advanced because the micro-electro-mechanical devices for automotive, domestic, health-care and consumer electronics can be fabricated with methods from IC industry. Polymer-based MEMS have a great potential for flexible electronics and biomedical applications, but to date, the techniques to engineer functional polymers into 3D microsystems, are still at their beginning because a coherent fabrication platform with the right tools and processes does not yet exist. The field could tremendously benefit from a coordinated effort in materials and manufacturing, in particular with a focus on biocompatible plastic materials. Additive manufacturing such as 3D printing and associated processing such as sintering has already started to transform traditional industry, but is not scalable much below a micrometer because the thermal processing is done in bulk or by lasers on surfaces. MEMS 4.0, in analogy with the industry 4.0 concept, aims to perform concerted research in additive manufacturing at the micro/nanoscale and associated key techniques. Using my expertise in MEMS and Nanotechnology, MEMS 4.0 will push the frontiers in new materials and new processing for MEMS by setting a focus on stencilling, printing, self-assembly and local thermal processing. This coherent processing framework will permit the use of delicate, soft, polymer materials to engineer the next generations of plastic MEMS. We are primarily targeting biodegradable implantable MEMS and permanently implantable glassy carbon MEMS. They are the most challenging to fabricate, but if successful, they also have an enormous impact for future wearables and implantables.

Progress

Along the main topics of this project, a brief overview of our recent research progress is listed in the following paragraphs:

1. Stenciling

Microstencils have been fabricated by electron beam lithography (EBL) and deep-UV (DUV) lithography and benchmarked for various application purposes including for usage on biocompatible substrates. Metallic micro/nanostructures were stenciled onto biocompatible stretchable materials leading to the discovery of an original method to create large-scale liquid metal structures on stretchable biocompatible substrates. These liquid metal structures are investigated as versatile strain gauges for polymeric MEMS.

2. Printing

One of the challenges in drug delivery systems is to encapsulate the active substance in order to protect it from deterioration. We have developed an innovative approach for encapsulation of liquid drugs in a biocompatible micro-container to prevent evaporation of the liquid media (i.e. water). The encapsulation media and the drug are sequentially inkjet printed into a reusable template, followed by UV curing of the encapsulation layer.

3. Self-assembly

An electron-tunneling based strain sensor has been developed. The sensor has the following three characteristics: i) it is built on a stretchable biocompatible substrate poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) which makes it useful for wearable or implantable devices, ii) the strain-sensitive electrical signal is measured through two self-assembled gold nanorods separated by a distance of less than 2 nm, iii) a slick device design transforms the macroscopic strain of the PDMS into a sub-Ångström displacement which can be detected through a change in the electron-tunneling current.

4. Thermal nanoprocessing

Thermal nanoprocessing of sub-100-nm structures through t-SPL is an emerging digital manufacturing technique. We have explored different ways to directly modify materials with a heated tip i.e. by annealing, melting or chemical modification. It was found that direct manipulation of 2D materials is an extremely compelling and versatile application of t-SPL. We have used t-SPL to locally cut 2D materials such as MoS₂ or MoTe₂ into arbitrary shapes [Liu et al. Adv. Mater. 2020, (accepted)]. A comprehensive thermal nano-processing library was published as an open-access review article.

5. Implantable biodegradable MEMS

We fabricated implantable biodegradable capsules for wireless controlled drug release made from biodegradable elastomers poly(glycerol sebacate) (PGS) and poly(octamethylene maleate (anhydride) citrate) (POMaC) by an innovative imprinting process. The 10 x 10 x 20 mm³-sized drug containers accommodate up to six isolated reservoirs to be loaded separately with a drug. The capsules were covered with biodegradable membranes equipped with wirelessly powered microheaters that can be each addressed individually to release mL volumes of liquid drugs in each compartment separately. Wirelessly triggered release of the drug by breaking the membrane through heating was demonstrated, posing a significant step towards power receivers and microheaters for a variety of biodegradable implantable medical devices [M. Rüegg PhD Thesis EPFL 2020].

Publications

Field Guide to Northern Tree-related Microhabitats: Descriptions and size limits for their inventory in boreal and hemiboreal forests of Europe and North America

R. Bütler Sauvain; L. Larrieu; L. F. Lunde; M. Maxence; B. Nordén et al.

Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, Switzerland, 2024.

Additive Micro-Manufacturing for Plastic Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems

Summary

Progress

1. Stenciling

2. Printing

3. Self-assembly

4. Thermal nanoprocessing

5. Implantable biodegradable MEMS

Publications

Field Guide to Northern Tree-related Microhabitats: Descriptions and size limits for their inventory in boreal and hemiboreal forests of Europe and North America

Data Champions Lunch Talks – Green Bytes: Data-Driven Approaches to EPFL Sustainability

Comparison of Three Viral Nucleic Acid Preamplification Pipelines for Sewage Viral Metagenomics

How to Support Students to Develop Skills that Promote Sustainability

How to Support Students Giving Each Other Constructive Feedback, Especially When It Is Difficult to Hear

How teachers can use the 3T PLAY trident framework to design an activity that develops transversal skills

The conceptual foundations of innate immunity: Taking stock 30 years later

Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin

No Last One

All That is Solid

Characterization of the gut-bone marrow axis through bile acid signaling

Studies of crystal collimation for heavy ion operation at the LHC

Engineering novel protein interactions with therapeutic potential using deep learning-guided surface design

Querying the Digital Archive of Science: Distant Reading, Semantic Modelling and Representation of Knowledge

Hybrid organic/metal-oxide shells on semiconductor nanocrystals via colloidal atomic layer deposition

Electrical and Optical Manifestations of Flat Band Physics in Van der Waals Materials

Plasmonically enhanced molecular junctions for investigation of atomic-scale fluctuations in self-assembled monolayers

Exact Obstacle Avoidance for Robots in Complex and Dynamic Environments Using Local Modulation

S-acylation and lipid exchange at the ER-Golgi membrane contact sites regulate pathogen entry in human cells

Serial Dependence in Human Visual Perception and Decision-Making

Data-Driven Methods for Controller Design in Atomic Force Microscopy

Quantum-mechanical effects in photoluminescence from thin crystalline gold films

Quantifying the effects of rainfall temporal variability on landscape evolution processes

Towards a metabolic theory of catchments: scaling of water and carbon fluxes with size

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Dataset to accompany publication “Quantum-mechanical effects in photoluminescence from thin crystalline gold films”

Impact of CO2-rich seawater injection on the flow properties of basalts

Architecture of a decentralised decision support system for futuristic beehives

TSLAM: a tag-based object-centered monocular navigation system for augmented manual woodworking.

Water weakening and the compressive brittle strength of carbonates: Influence of fracture toughness and static friction

Integration of the Pilatus3 detector for soft X-ray diagnostics on TCV

Siloxide tripodal ligands as a scaffold for stabilizing lanthanides in the +4 oxidation state

High-Permittivity Polysiloxanes for Bright, Stretchable Electroluminescent Devices

An extension of the stochastic sewing lemma and applications to fractional stochastic calculus

A bridge between trust and control: computational workflows meet automated battery cycling

Capsizing due to friction-induced twist in the failure of stopper knots

A CTCF-dependent mechanism underlies the Hox timer relation to a segmented body plan

Gradient High-Q Dielectric Metasurfaces for Broadband Sensing and Control of Vibrational Light-Matter Coupling

SOMOphilic alkyne vs radical-polar crossover approaches: The full story of the azido-alkynylation of alkenes

Dielectric elastomer actuator-based valveless pump as Fontan failure assist device: introduction and preliminary study

Tree diversity reduces variability in sapling survival under drought

Probing structural and dynamic properties of MAPbCl3 hybrid perovskite using Mn2+ EPR

Benchmarking machine-readable vectors of chemical reactions on computed activation barriers

Quantum radio astronomy: Data encodings and quantum image processing

Comprehensive Memory Safety Validation: An Alternative Approach to Memory Safety

A Method of Moments Estimator for Interacting Particle Systems and their Mean Field Limit

A setup for hard x-ray time-resolved resonant inelastic x-ray scattering at SwissFEL

An aircraft assembly process formalism and verification method based on semantic modeling and MBSE

Stellar Metallicities and Gradients in the Isolated, Quenched Low-mass Galaxy Tucana

Twisted pair transmission line coil – a flexible, self-decoupled and robust element for 7 T MRI

3D Printing of Double Network Granular Elastomers with Locally Varying Mechanical Properties

Dopant-additive synergism enhances perovskite solar modules

Proliferation-driven mechanical compression induces signalling centre formation during mammalian organ development

Spin-Reorientation-Driven Linear Magnetoelectric Effect in Topological Antiferromagnet Cu3TeO6

Is There a Special Role for Ovarian Hormones in the Pathogenesis of Lobular Carcinoma?

Stick-slip-to-stick transition of liquid oscillations in a U-shaped tube

Opportunities and challenges in design and optimization of protein function

Impact of beam-coupling impedance on the Schottky spectrum of bunched beam

Gaussian universality of perceptrons with random labels

Diffusion of brain metabolites highlights altered brain microstructure in type C hepatic encephalopathy: a 9.4 T preliminary study

Teaching about non-deterministic physics: an almost forgotten fundamental contribution of Marie Curie

The angiogenic growth of cities

Learning Weakly Convex Regularizers for Convergent Image-Reconstruction Algorithms

Euclid: Improving the efficiency of weak lensing shear bias calibration

Randomized flexible GMRES with deflated restarting

An interior penalty coupling strategy for isogeometric non-conformal Kirchhoff-Love shell patches

Stress tolerance of lightweight glass-free PV modules for vehicle integration

On the Arithmetic and Geometric Fusion of Beliefs for Distributed Inference

Alpha1-antitrypsin improves survival in murine abdominal sepsis model by decreasing inflammation and sequestration of free heme

Quantitative prediction of crystallization in laser powder bed fusion of a Zr-based bulk metallic glass with high oxygen content

A cut-cell method for the numerical simulation of 3D multiphase flows with strong interfacial effects