Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Table of Contents Summary List of Tables List of Figures 1 Introduction 1.1 Background 1.2 Objectives 1.3 Organisation 2 Microfabrication techniques 2.1 MEMS 2.2 MEMS fabrication technologies 3 Mould Fabrication 3.1 Photoresist 3.2 KMPR Properties 3.3 SU-8: Negative Epoxy Resist 3.4 Preparing exposure mask [37] 3.5 Copper electroplating 3.6 Photo-Lithographic process of KMPR 3.7 Experiment 1- Photolithographic mask 3.8 Experiment 2- Metal evaporation 3.9 Experiment 3 - Mould fabrication using photolithography 3.10 Experiment 4- Mould fabrication with adjusted parameters (soft bake, exposure energy and post exposure bake) 4 Electroplating 4.1 Electroplating 4.2 Electrochemical deposition 4.3 Electroplating Mechanism 4.4 Electroplating Calculation 4.5 Electroplating parameters: 4.6 Equipment 4.7 Experiment 1 Electroplating KMPR mould 4.8 Experiment 2 Electroplating KMPR mould (low current) 5 Alternative fabrication method 5.1 PDMS double casting 5.2 Advantages of using PDMS 5.3 Problem with PDMS 5.4 Experiment 1 PDMS on PDMS double casting 5.5 Experiment 2 PDMS on PDMS double casting with thermal aging 5.6 Experiment 3 Electroplating PDMS mould with seed layer (chromium, 20nm and nickel 50 nm) 5.7 Experiment 4 Electroplating PDMS mould with seed layer (chromium, 20nm and gold 250 nm) 5.8 Experiment 5 Removing PDMS mould from metallic structure 6 Conclusions and future work 6.1 Conclusions 6.2 Recommendations for future work References