Fabrication of a freestanding micro mechanical structure using electroplated thick metal with a HAR SU-8 mold

In this thesis, fabrication technology of a freestanding micro mechanical structure using electroplated thick metal with a high-aspect-ratio SU-8 mold was studied. A cost-effective fabrication process using electroplating with the SU-8 mold was developed without expensive equipment and materials such as deep reactive-ion etching (DRIE) or a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. The process factors and methods for the removal of SU-8 were studied as a key technique of the thick metal micro mechanical structure. A novel method that removes cross-linked SU-8 completely without leaving remnants of the resist or altering the electroplated microstructure was utilized. The experimental data pertaining to the relationship between the geometric features and the parameters of the removal process are summarized. Based on the established SU-8 removal process, an electroplated nickel comb structure with high-aspect-ratio SU-8 mold was fabricated in a cost-effective manner. In addition, a freestanding micro mechanical structure without a sacrificial layer was successfully realized. The in-plane free movements of the released freestanding structure are demonstrated by electromagnetic actuation. This research implies that various types of MEMS devices can be developed at a low-cost with design flexibility.     

Fabrication of grids and collimators using SU-8 as a mold

The fabrication process of ultradeep (aspect ratio greater than 25) microchannels in SU-8 photoresist using deep X-ray lithography is described. We have demonstrated that with single-layer coatings, 1-mm-deep trenches in continuous resist layer can be achieved reproducibly. Microchannels with vertical walls and with walls tilted up to 20° from vertical have been fabricated. Electroforming of the channels resulted in metal grids and collimators for various applications. A thickness enhancement method for fabrication of very tall structures is also described.We would like to thank Dr. Francesco De Carlo for support on the beamline, and Judi Yaeger and Ruben Khachatryan for the experimental assistance. The work was supported by NIH SBIR Grants: R44 CA76752 and R43 CA91762, and by the U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. W-31–109-ENG-38.     

Adhesive bonding with SU-8 in a vacuum for capacitive pressure sensors

This paper describes a method for fabricating capacitive pressure sensors through the use of adhesive bonding with SU-8 in a vacuum. The influence of different parameters on the bonding of structured wafers was investigated. It was found that pre-bake time, pumping time, and the thickness of the crosslink layer are the most important factors for successful bonding. Bonding quality was evaluated by inspection through the transparent glass of the sensor and through the use of an SEM photograph, with 90% of the area successfully bonded and an ultimate yield of 70% of the sensors. The measured bonding strength was 17.15 MPa and 19.6 MPa for wafers bonded in 80 °C and 100 °C, respectively. The pressure–capacitance characteristic test results show that this bonding process is a viable micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS) fabrication technology for cavity sealing in a vacuum.     

Simulation of deep UV lithography with SU-8 resist by using 365 nm light source

The deep lithography of thick resist layer is the primary step of LIGA technology. UV Proximity lithography, which is used to fabricate high aspect ratio MEMS normally, is investigated in this paper. The light intensity distribution in the thick photoresist layer mainly depends on the diffraction produced by the gap between mask and wafer in proximity lithography. Fresnel diffraction model is used to simulate lithography process normally, which the thin photoresist layer is used in the lithography process. But it is not accurate in deep lithography process. A correction to the Fresnel diffraction theory is used to simulate the lithography process depending on the scalar diffraction theory of light propagation in this paper. The difference of this two models is given in this paper. The simulation results show that the corrected model can obtain more accurate simulation results than the Fresnel diffraction model. The experiment results and the theory analysis both indicate that: the structure contrast decreases with the increase of the film thickness. The smaller the structure linewidth is, the faster the structure contrast decreases. The linewidth of microstructure is not equivalent from the top to the bottom, broaden in the middle part normally. The theory simulation gives the quantitative analysis.This work was supported by of China 973 Program (No. 1999033109).     

Different methods for the fabrication of UV-LIGA molds using SU-8 with tapered de-molding angles

De-molding is one of the most crucial steps for successful mass production of high aspect ratio microstructures in microreplication technologies of LIGA process. With a proper taper angle in mold structure, normal contact pressure on the structure will be abated; this will facilitate the de-molding procedure and at the same time prevent the microstructures of mold from being damaged. However, in the case of UV lithography, the top area of the patterned SU-8 resist is observed to be larger than the bottom area especially in cases of thick layer and high aspect ratio structures. In order to obtain an applicable metal mold for hot-embossing process, we purpose here several novel methods with backside exposure which can fabricate different taper angles with proper direction on the mold structures easily. In this paper, we described the technology concept, process details and related experimental results both in mold structures and molded PMMA replicas. In addition, various interesting 3D microstructures can be produced by combining these exposure methods. On-chip microneedle arrays were selected to demonstrate this ability.     

Releasing high aspect ratio SU-8 microstructures using AZ photoresist as a sacrificial layer on metallized Si substrates

This paper presents a successful method for releasing high aspect ratio SU-8 micro-structures by the use of positive photoresist (AZ 4620) as sacrificial layer. The AZ 4620 photoresist sacrificial layer was dissolved by the SU-8 developer (propylene glycol monomethyl ether acetate). Thus, this process reduces the need for complex microfabrication steps and equipments which are otherwise required in traditional methods using metal sacrificial layers. The current method is both cost-effective and time-effective because no additional releasing method or material is needed to remove the fabricated SU-8 structures. Further, the influence of surface energy on the adhesion between Si and SU-8 was demonstrated and metallic thin layer coating on Si was employed to further reduce the lift-off duration. The results obtained showed that the duration for lift-off of SU-8 structures from metal (Al) coated Si substrate is much lower (approximately 90 % time saving) and the surface morphology of the released structures has lesser micropore concentration compared to the process employing bare Si as the substrate. In both processes AZ 4620 was the sacrificial layer whereas the metalized Si substrate could be re-used.     

Autonomous feature following for visual surveillance using a small unmanned aerial vehicle with gimbaled camera system

This paper represents the development of feature following control and distributed navigation algorithms for visual surveillance using a small unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a low-cost imaging sensor unit. An efficient map-based feature generation and following control algorithm is developed to make an onboard imaging sensor to track a target. An efficient navigation system is also designed for real-time position and velocity estimates of the unmanned aircraft, which is used as inputs for the path following controller. The performance of the proposed autonomous path following capability with a stabilized gimbaled camera onboard a small unmanned aerial robot is demonstrated through flight tests with application to target tracking for real-time visual surveillance.     

Investigations of SU-8 removal from metallic high aspect ratio microstructures with a novel plasma technique

First promising investigations of SU-8 removal experiments with a novel plasma etching technique are presented. The basic idea of this technique is to separate the highly effective generation of chemical radicals (e.g. oxygen radicals) using a traveling wave reactor (TWR) microwave source with water cooled plasma zone from the chemical reaction with the resist polymer. The etching tool operates in a remote and downstream mode with very high radical density allowing precise thermal management of the substrates on the chuck giving controlled process conditions without deviation in temperature, and generally preventing ion bombardment, at least resulting in gentle processing without jeopardizing the integrity of the metal structures. Very good removal of SU-8 with very few residues and very high etching rates up to 10 μm per minute are observed in first experiments which are offering chances to get even more than 20 μm per minute. The etching process is isotropic, and the rate stays stable during the whole removing process even for very thick films of 1 mm and more. First application examples of SU-8 removal are demonstrating the great potential of the presented microwave plasma based technique not only for the cleaning of metallic microparts but also for other more sensitive materials which is demonstrated by SU-8 removal from graphite X-ray mask substrates.     

Simulation and experimental validation of a SU-8 based PCR thermocycler chip with integrated heaters and temperature sensor

We present a SU-8 based polymerase chain reaction (PCR) chip with integrated platinum thin film heaters and temperature sensor. The device is fabricated in SU-8 on a glass substrate. The use of SU-8 provides a simple microfabrication process for the PCR chamber, controllable surface properties and can allow on chip integration to other SU-8 based functional elements. Finite element modeling (FEM) and experiments show that the temperature distribution in the PCR chamber is homogeneous and that the chip is capable of fast thermal cycling. With heating and cooling rates of up to 50 and 30 °C/s, respectively, the performance of the chip is comparable with the best silicon micromachined PCR chips presented in the literature. The SU-8 chamber surface was found to be PCR compatible by amplification of yeast gene ribosomal protein S3 and Campylobacter gene cadF. The PCR compatibility of the chamber surfaces was enhanced by silanization.     

New fabrication techniques of SU-8 fiber holder with cantilever-type elastic microclips by inclined UV lithography in water using single Mylar mask

In contact UV lithography, a pair of cantilever beams fabricated by two inclined exposures at ±45° in SU-8 using a single mask will form a connected end on the top of SU-8 layer. These beams made of SU-8 with fixed-end have been used as optical fiber holders (Ling and Lian in Microsyst Technol 13(3–4):245–251, 2007). Recently, a two-mask, two-step process to fabricate free-end cantilever beams from SU-8 using inclined UV lithography has been developed (Ling et al. in Microsyst Technol 15(3):429–435, 2009), which has been successfully applied to fabricate SU-8 optical fiber holders with long free-end cantilever beams. In this process, two masks are needed in order to obtain free-end beams and the alignment between two exposures is always time consuming with limited accuracy. Two new techniques, inclined UV shadow mask lithography and inclined UV proximity lithography, have been illustrated here for fabricating free-end SU-8 cantilever beams, which eliminate the precise alignment step required in our previous work (Ling et al. in Microsyst Technol 15(3):429–435, 2009). In the inclined UV shadow mask lithography approach, the SU-8 cantilever beams without connected ends are formed by using one main mask and two shadow masks. Each shadow mask is used to selectively transfer one of the two separated patterns on main mask into SU-8 layer at +45° and −45°, respectively. In the inclined UV proximity lithography approach, a proper proximity gap between mask and SU-8 surface is obtained by using a 50 μm thick Mylar sheet, so that the exposing light paths that formed connected beam ends will fall inside the proximity layer instead of the SU-8. In this way, the desired open-end cantilever structures can be achieved. In this paper, the principles and the fabrication procedures of the proposed techniques are demonstrated and the preliminary results are discussed.     

Evaluation of feature selection methods for text classification with small datasets using multiple criteria decision-making methods

The evaluation of feature selection methods for text classification with small sample datasets must consider classification performance, stability, and efficiency. It is, thus, a multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. Yet there has been few research in feature selection evaluation using MCDM methods which considering multiple criteria. Therefore, we use MCDM-based methods for evaluating feature selection methods for text classification with small sample datasets. An experimental study is designed to compare five MCDM methods to validate the proposed approach with 10 feature selection methods, nine evaluation measures for binary classification, seven evaluation measures for multi-class classification, and three classifiers with 10 small datasets. Based on the ranked results of the five MCDM methods, we make recommendations concerning feature selection methods. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the used MCDM-based method in evaluating feature selection methods.     

基于跳跃连接金字塔模型的小目标检测

随着深度学习的发展,目标检测已经获得了较高的精度和效率。但是小目标的检测仍然是一个挑战。小目标检测准确率较低的重要原因是没有充分利用高层特征的语义信息和低层特征的细节信息之间的关系。针对上述问题,本文提出一种基于跳跃连接金字塔模型的小目标检测方法。与其他的目标检测方法不同,本文提出利用跳跃连接金字塔结构来融合多层高层语义特征信息和低层特征图的细节信息。而且为了更好地提取不同尺度物体对应的特征信息,在网络模型中采用不同大小的卷积核和不同步长的空洞卷积来提取全局特征信息。在PASCAL VOC和MS COCO数据集上进行了实验,验证了算法的有效性。     

Force/position tracking for a robotic manipulator in compliant contact with a surface using neuro-adaptive control

The problem of force/position tracking for a robotic manipulator in compliant contact with a surface under non-parametric uncertainties is considered. In particular, structural uncertainties are assumed to characterize the compliance and surface friction models, as well as the robot dynamic model. A novel neuro-adaptive controller is proposed, that exploits the approximation capabilities of the linear in the weights neural networks, guaranteeing the uniform ultimate boundedness of force and position error with respect to arbitrarily small sets, plus the boundedness of all signals in the closed loop. Simulations highlight the approach.     

Micromolding fabrication of microresistors with a composite of carbon nanotubes and SU-8 polymer and the application in Wilkinson power divider

This paper reports a new method to fabricate microresistors for applications in micro-electromechanical systems. The fabrication is based on ultraviolet (UV) lithography and micromolding replication. A master mold was first made using UV lithography of a negative-tune photoresist, SU-8. The SU-8 master mold was then used to produce a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) intermediate mold. The PDMS intermediate mold was used to replicate the microresistor using composite mixture of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and SU-8 photoresist. The replicated microresistors were thermally cured at 95 °C for 6 h. The performances of the replicated micro-resistors were then tested. The experiment had also been conducted using the micro-resistors as isolation resistance in a Wilkinson power divider to test their functionality. Because passive communication components such as Wilkinson power dividers can potentially be made with lithography/micromolding technologies and using polymer as structural material, microresistors as reported in this paper may potentially be suitable for using in such applications.     

隐特征监督的孪生网络弱光光流估计

目的 弱光照条件下成像存在信噪比低、运动模糊等问题,这对光流估计带来了极大挑战。与现有“先增强—再估计”的光流估计方法不同,为了避免在弱光图像增强阶段损失场景的运动信息,提出一种隐特征监督的弱光光流估计孪生网络学习方法。方法 首先,该方法采用权重共享的孪生网络提取可映射的弱光光流和正常光照光流特征;进而,计算弱光邻帧图像的K近邻相关性卷表,以解决计算4D全对相关性卷表的高时空复杂度问题;在全局运动聚合模块中引入针对二维运动特征的注意力机制,以降低弱光条件下强噪声、运动模糊及低对比度对光流估计的不利影响。最后,提出隐特征监督的光流估计模块,采用正常光照光流特征监督弱光照光流特征的学习,实现高精度的光流估计。结果 与3种最新光流估计方法的对比实验表明,在正常光照条件下,本文方法取得了与现有最佳光流估计方法相近的性能。在FCDN(flying chairs dark noise)数据集上,本文方法光流估计性能最优,相较于次优方法端点误差精度提升了0.16;在多亮度光流估计（various brightness optical flow,VBOF）数据集上,本文方法端点误差精度提升了0.08。...     

Scheduling a single batch-processing machine with non-identical job sizes in fuzzy environment using an improved ant colony optimization

In this paper, we introduce the fuzzy model of the makespan on a single batch-processing machine with non-identical job sizes. The uncertainty of the jobs and the machine in the processing is denoted using fuzzy logic. Then an improved ant colony optimization (ACO) method is proposed and the Metropolis criterion is used to select the paths of ants to overcome the immature convergence of the algorithm. In the experiment, we adopt the random instances and the results of the fuzzy makespan demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms GA and SA in all instances.     

Design of accurate classifiers with a compact fuzzy-rule base using an evolutionary scatter partition of feature space

An evolutionary approach to designing accurate classifiers with a compact fuzzy-rule base using a scatter partition of feature space is proposed, in which all the elements of the fuzzy classifier design problem have been moved in parameters of a complex optimization problem. An intelligent genetic algorithm (IGA) is used to effectively solve the design problem of fuzzy classifiers with many tuning parameters. The merits of the proposed method are threefold: 1) the proposed method has high search ability to efficiently find fuzzy rule-based systems with high fitness values, 2) obtained fuzzy rules have high interpretability, and 3) obtained compact classifiers have high classification accuracy on unseen test patterns. The sensitivity of control parameters of the proposed method is empirically analyzed to show the robustness of the IGA-based method. The performance comparison and statistical analysis of experimental results using ten-fold cross validation show that the IGA-based method without heuristics is efficient in designing accurate and compact fuzzy classifiers using 11 well-known data sets with numerical attribute values.     

Fabrication of a metal protector for a fiber sensor using through-mask electrochemical micromachining with pulse DC power

The purpose of this study is to fabricate a stainless steel protector for a weak fiber sensor after first stripping the polymer outer-layer off the fiber. In addition to protecting the fiber sensor, the stainless steel protector is required to connect the detection target and the sensor which requires drilling holes in the protector. We accomplished this by electrochemical micromachining the stainless steel protector using pulse DC, using 1 kV/m, 6.62% weight concentration of NaCl electrolyte solution, 500 rpm anode rotating rate, a 5 MHz pulse frequency, a 50% duty factor, and 6 min of machining time with a ring cathode gave the best results, producing an average hole-radius of 231.36 μm.