Micro-assembly with fluids

New applications and the reduction of costs will lead to smaller and thinner electronic chips. Polymer electronics can help for a few applications, but more complex solutions will stay on silicon for the next few years. The latest roadmap of the VDI/VDE-IT clearly points to this trend of size reduction. In the future, the diameter of microchips will decrease and the conventional manufacturing methods, as pick and place, will increasingly get into trouble. Problems arose by picking up small chips. Additionally, these chips will stick on the pin transporting the chip. In this paper we present a new assembly method called FluidAssem which avoids these problems.