Computer-aided process planning for fabrication of three-dimensional microstructures for bioMEMS applications

In recent years, there has been increasing interest from both academies and industries in developing micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) technology for biological applications, known as bioMEMS or biochips. Targeting at high throughput biomolecule analysis, drug compound screening, and reduction of reagent and sample volume, today's bioMEMS devices come with miniaturised design and increased complexity of microstructures. Fabrication of such a complex bioMEMS structure involves a number of layer fabrication cycles. Moreover, a two-dimensional (2D) mask is required for each process. Thus, manually generating such a complex process plan has become a difficult task. With recent advances in material technology, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) silicone material has been widely applied in nowadays bioMEMS fabrication. This paper proposes a novel automated process planning approach for fabrication of three-dimensional (3D) microstructures in bioMEMS. This approach can handle both PDMS casting and traditional micro fabrication processes. It integrates a novel solid decomposition method and a feasibility search algorithm. Also, it can directly handle the solid model of an integrated microstructure with B-rep representation, and automatically generate the data of the fabrication process plan along with masks. A process planner prototype has been implemented. An application example is presented to demonstrate the functionality of the prototype.