Full wafer fabrication technologies of micro pumps

Based on the idea of the fabrication platform in the automobile industry to save cost and time of fabrication, the fabrication of other micro fluidic actuators will be reorganised to a full wafer fabrication technology line too. The equipment therefore will be the same for different fluidic devices like micro pumps, active micro valves and micro mixers. To fabricate different fluidic devices just particular design is to be done by appropriate masks and etching protocols. All different fluidic devices will be fabricated with the same front end and back end process on the same equipment, no special steps or equipment are necessary. The front end device fabrication for the different fluidic products is based on a 4" wafer process integrated in a 100 class cleanroom and yet organised in a platform conception. The main process modules are oxide, nitride, doubled sided lithography, dry etching, wafer bond technologies, KOH deep etching and sputtering. Also the back end fabrication will be modular: changing the fabrication from one device to another, downtime of the different equipment is reduced to few minutes because only device specific adapters, clamps or conversion kits must be changed to fabricate different fluidic devices with the same equipment. Intermediate tests will be done on wafer level, thus time for single product endtest will be reduced. Reliability tests like temperature and vibration tests will be developed. This back end fabrication will be integrated in a laboratory (10 000 class cleanroom). High yield and reproducibility, low cost, good performance and repeatability will be the result of realizing the full wafer fabrication platform of microfluidic devices.